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MAN AND THE COSMOS 



MAN AND THE COSMOS 

AN INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS 



BY 

JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON, Ph.D., LL.D. 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY; 

AUTHOR OF "THE FIELD OF PHILOSOPHY," "TYPICAL 

MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD," ETC. 




D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

NEW YORK : : MCMXXII : : LONDON 






V "1 



xo i s i 



COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 



PBJNTEP IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



nCT 20 '22 

,CI.A6S639 4 



/x.o 



TO 
MY TEACHERS AND FRIENDS 

JACOB GOULD SCHURMAN 
JAMES EDWIN CREIGHTON 



PREFACE 

The following work is a systematic consideration of the funda- 
mental problems and concepts of philosophical thought in the 
light of recent discussion in science and philosophy. The leading 
motive of the entire work is the problem of Human Personality. 
I have therefore given the largest amount of space to the treat- 
ment of the Self. But, since one cannot consider the place of 
personality in the universe without being drawn into the funda- 
mental problem of metaphysics, namely, that of the structure of 
the universe as a whole, I have tried to give just consideration to 
the latter problem. Moreover, since philosophy is the thinking 
consideration of fundamental questions, one must settle accounts 
with the problems of thought and knowledge. I have, therefore, 
begun with a comprehensive treatment of these problems. 

My theory of knowledge is realistic, but it differs materially 
from the standpoints of most of the new realists. I hold that 
the true antithesis in theories of knowledge is not between realism 
and idealism, but between realism and mentalism or subjectivism. 
The great idealistic tradition in metaphysics, from Plato to Hegel, 
Bradley, and Bosanquet, is not subjectivistic in theory of knowl- 
edge. In the main, I sympathize most with this tradition, although 
I have found it necessary to cricitize the concepts of the Absolute, 
and the equivocal treatment of Time, Progress, and Personality, 
in recent representatives of metaphysical idealism. To me the 
dominating note of the great idealistic tradition is the ever renewed 
attempt to determine, in the light of reason and of the history 
of culture, the humanistic values of experience and the place of 
these in the universe. My conception of the meaning of the 
universe is dynamic. Therefore the metaphysical standpoint of 
the following work might be called Dynamic Idealism, in the sense 
that it aims to find in the living universe a home and scope for 
humanistic ideals or values. My chief quarrel with pragmatic 
humanism is that its humanism is too narrow, and that it tends 
to slight the place of order or reason in man and the universe. 

But I have no interest in "philosophy as the art of affixing 

vii 



viii PREFACE 

labels," to use J. E. Creighton's happy expression. Labels are 
convenient for cataloguing and storing goods for ready access, 
but, in the vital, many-sided and global enterprise of thought, 
which philosophy is, they are dangerous; perhaps their harmful- 
ness outweighs their usefulness. I know no great thinker whose 
philosophy is not misrepresented by such labels as "idealistic," 
" realistic,' ' " rationalistic/ ' "empiristic," etc. I hold no brief 
for any "school" or "movement" of thought. I am interested 
only in trying to puzzle out such of the meanings of the world 
as I can. 

The extent of my indebtedness to philosophers past and present 
will be obvious to the instructed reader. It would be quite impos- 
sible, within the limits of a preface, to make adequate acknowledg- 
ment. In general, I have learned much from those whom I have 
criticized sharply. I cannot, however, let this opportunity pass 
without thanking my former teachers in the Sage School of 
Philosophy of Cornell University, alike for their instruction, 
example, and continued interest. And to the dear and inspiring 
memory of the man to whose instruction and warm personal inter- 
est I owe the foundation of my philosophical scholarship and the 
encouragement to go on with it, the late William Clark of Trinity 
College, Toronto, I here pay my tribute of gratitude and affection. 

I am deeply indebted to the thoughtful interest of President 
William Oxley Thompson in suggesting, and to the, trustees of 
the Ohio State University in sanctioning, my relief from routine 
duties in order to bring this work to completion. 

I am indebted to my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy, 
Doctors A. E. Avey, A. R. Chandler, and R. D. Williams, for 
their never failing interest, and, especially, for the cheerful 
alacrity with which they have relieved me of my teaching duties 
in order that I might finish and publish this book. For a number 
of stylistic suggestions I am indebted to Doctor Chandler. Doctors 
J. E. Creighton, Chandler and Avey have assisted me materially 
in proofreading. 

I have incorporated portions of articles published, at intervals 
during the past twenty years or more, in The Philosophical Review, 
The Journal of Philosophy, and The International Journal of 
Ethics. I make acknowledgments to the editors of these periodicals. 

Joseph Alexander Leighton 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Introductory— What Is Metaphysics? . . . . 1 

I. The Scope of Metaphysics 1 

II. The Method of Metaphysics 6 

Appendix: Phenomenology as the Science of Pure 

Consciousness 13 

BOOK I 

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 

II. What is Thinking? 25 

Appendix: Existence and Subsistence: Philosophy and 

Gegenstandstheorie 39 

III. Percepts and Concepts 44 

IV. The Criteria of Knowledge 49 

V. Knowledge and Reality 68 

Appendix: The New Critical Realism .... 94 

VI. Appearance and Reality 98 

VII. Error 110 

yill. The Final Ground op Knowledge . . . .116 

BOOK II 

THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF REALITY— 
THE CATEGORIES 

IX. What Are Categories? 133 

X. Likeness and Unlikeness— Identity and Diversity . 137 

XI. Quantity and Quality 142 

XII. Relations 151 

XIII. Order 162 

XIV. The Particular, The Individual, and the Universal 169 
XV. Substance 181 

XVI. Change and Causality 191 

Appendix: The Knowledge of Activity .... 203 
XVII. Individuality, Value and Purpose •'»..., 206 

BOOK III 

EMPIRICAL EXISTENTS 

XVIII. Space and Time 215 

I. Empirical Space and Time 218 

II. Conceptual Space and Time 219 

III. Physical Space and Time 223 

Appendix : Dr. Alexander's Theory of Space-time . 235 

ix 



CONTENTS 



XIX. 

XX. 
XXI. 



v* 



PAGE 

Physical Reality 238 

Appendix: Panpsyehism . . . . . . . 248 

Life and Mechanism 253 

Evolution, Life and Mind 261 

I. The Factors of Organic Evolution . . .261 
II. The Mechanistic Doctrine of Evolution . . 266 

III. Evolution and Teleology 272 

IV. Life and Matter 276 



BOOK IV 

PERSONALITY AND ITS VALUES— PHILOSOPHY OF 
SELFHOOD AND SOCIETY 



XXII. 
XXIII. 

XXIV. 



XXV. 

XXVI. 

XXVII. 



XXVIII. 

XXIX. 

XXX. 

XXXI. 

XXXII. 

XXXIII. 
XXXIV. 



The Problem of Personality 289 

The Nature of the Self . . . . . . 299 

Appendix: Mr. Bradley's Criticism of the Self . . 312 
Consciousness 315 

I. The Unity of Consciousness 316 

II. Consciousness and Its Objects .... 317 
III. The Idealistic Theory of Consciousness . . 329 

The Subconscious 334 

Multiple Personality 348 

Mind and Body 355 

I. Dualism 355 

II. Psychophysical Parallelism 359 

III. Psychophysical Individualism 366 

Appendix I: Matter, Energy and Will .... 377 
Appendix II: The Origin of the Soul .... 378 
Personality and the Cultural Order . . . 382 

Personality and Values 395 

Ethical Values 414 

Feeling and Values 427 

The Interrelationships of Values .... 434 

The Interpersonal Emotions 445 

Moral Freedom 448 

Immortality 458 



BOOK V 
THE ORDER OF THE UNIVERSE; COSMOLOGY 



XXXV. The Universal Order . . . . 
I. The Spatial and Temporal Order 
II. The Ultimate Noetic Order 
III. The Cosmic Ground of Values 
Appendix: The Meanings of the Infinite 
XXXVI. Finite Selves and the Over-self 

Immanence and Transcendence 
XXXVII. Perfection and Evolution 



467 
467 
475 
476 
480 
486 
495 
501 



CONTENTS 



XI 



CHAPTER PAGE 

XXXVIII. Optimism and Pessimism— The Problem of Evil . 517 

I. Natural Evil 517 

II. Moral Evil 52fJ 

III. Evil and the Idea of a Perfect Being . . .524 

XXXIX. Metaphysics and Religion 536 

I. The Methods and Aims of Metaphysics and Re- 
ligion . . . 536 

II. Is There Immediacy in Religious Knowledge? . 549 

III. The Meaning of Faith 555 

Postscript 562 

Index 565 



MAN AND THE COSMOS 

CHAPTEK I 

INTKODU CTORY I WHAT IS METAPHYSICS? 

I. The Scope of Metaphysics 

The origin of the term "metaphysics," ta meta ta physica, 
"the [books] after the physics," the title given by an editor to a 
collection of writings by Aristotle, does not throw much light on 
the scope of the discipline. Probably the editor meant by the 
title to indicate that the problems thereof should be taken up after 
one had studied natural science. Meta, "after," was later taken to 
mean "beyond" or "above," and "metaphysics" the science of 
that which transcends physics. In the body of the writings in 
question Aristotle calls the study first philosophy, the science of 
being or ontology, and theology. It may be defined, provisionally, 
as the science of the first principles of reality, or the theory of 
the structure and meaning of reality as a whole, or the theory of 
the nature of the cosmos. Philosophers are not in entire agree- 
ment as to the precise scope of the subject. All are agreed that 
metaphysics deals with the problems of the structure and meaning 
of reality; but some hold that epistemology, the doctrine of the 
nature of knowledge and its place in reality, is a separate disci- 
pline. Some hold that the problems of the place of values in 
reality or of the relationships of existence and value (axiology) 
do not belong to metaphysics. If one accepted these distinctions, 
philosophical system would consist of three parts — epistemology, 
metaphysics, and axiology, or the theory of the place of truth, 
goodness and beauty in the universe. I hold that metaphysics 
includes all these problems and, therefore, is identical with philo- 
sophical system. While it would not be in accord with historic 
usage to deny the term "philosopher" to every thinker who has not 



2 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

achieved a systematic conception of the universe, a cosmology or 
metaphysics, a full or well-rounded philosophy is a theory of the 
universe. Hence metaphysics is identical in scope with philo- 
sophical system. It is the theory of the first principles of reality. 
It is impossible to formulate a theory of truth or knowledge with- 
out formulating a theory of reality. It is equally impossible to 
consider the place of values in reality without raising the entire 
problem of the nature and place of personality; and the latter 
problem includes all the problems of the relation of the mental and 
the physical, of the individual and the universal, of identity and 
diversity, causation, substance, space and time, thought and 
reality. Since every fundamental problem of philosophy is inter- 
locked with all the others, it is, in the end, the most consistent pro- 
cedure to recognize that metaphysics and philosophical system 
are identical in scope and content. 

Of course the term philosophy, as a comprehensive name for 
certain studies, now is usually employed to include a number of 
subordinate subjects — logic, ethics, aesthetics, the philosophy of 
religion, social and political philosophy. Until recently it in- 
cluded psychology, but the latter is now generally regarded as a 
more or less independent discipline. Every science involves 
philosophical problems, but the above-mentioned subjects all raise, 
in one form or another, the problem of values and thus start meta- 
physical questions of central import. 

Thus metaphysics is the clearing house for all fundamental 
philosophical problems. It is the comprehensive discipline in 
which all philosophical issues and theories converge. Indeed, 
inasmuch as the special sciences, such as physics, biology, psychol- 
ogy, and sociology, set out from unexamined dogmatic assump- 
tions and issue, severally, in various uncoordinated results which 
require synthesis, in order to yield a consistent world view, to 
metaphysics belongs the twofold task of critically examining the 
primary assumptions of the sciences and of synthesizing their con- 
clusions into a harmonious whole. As a critical inquiry into the 
validity, scope and interrelations of the respective fundamental 
assumptions and conclusions of the special sciences, metaphysics 
is the criticism of the categories, that is, of the chief concepts 
which man uses in the ordering and mastering of experience. 

But philosophy is not limited to the consideration of the funda- 
mental problems of pure science. The affective personal and 



WHAT IS METAPHYSICS? 3 

interpersonal value attitudes and experiences embodied in moral 
and social relations, in aesthetic experience and religion, likewise 
involve philosophical problems; especially when these value atti- 
tudes and the beliefs that are basic to them come into conflict with 
scientific theories. Thus, we find raised the problem of the ulti- 
mate relation of existence and value — how far does the course of 
reality honor and sustain the values that have their immediate 
seat in the life of human personality ? To attempt to thresh out 
such problems is to embark on the wide and stormy ocean of meta- 
physics. 

Metaphysics, the heart of philosophy, seeks by persistent reflec- 
tion to see things steadily and to see them whole; in Goethe's 
words, "Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren resolut zu leben." In other 
words, metaphysics seeks a consistent and total interpretation of 
experience. It cannot be content with any partial or abstract 
view of life and reality. A system of philosophy, or metaphysics, 
is a union of a world view and a life view in one harmonious, com- 
plete, integral conception. In so far as any man strives to attain, 
by rational inquiry, a consistent and comprehensive view of life 
and reality, he is a metaphysician. The only differences between 
thinking human beings in this regard lie in the persistency, thor- 
oughness, and comprehensiveness with which they pursue meta- 
physical reflection. It follows, of course, in view of the 
fragmentariness and the discordancies of our experiences and the 
imperfection of our analysis and synthesis of the meanings of 
experience, that metaphysics must remain in this life incomplete. 
Only a complete or perfect experience of the universe would bring 
to man a complete metaphysics ; and on the other hand, a perfect 
experience would abolish the need for metaphysics. It is precisely 
the fragmentariness and inconsistency in our actual experience 
that drives us into metaphysics. As Mr. Bradley has wittily said, 
"Metaphysics consists in finding bad reasons for what we believe 
on instinct. But to find these reasons is no less an instinct." 

Every special science and every special form of practical 
activity interprets the facts of experience from some limited and 
one-sided or abstract point of view. Metaphysics aims to correct 
these abstractions. For example, the physicist and the chemist 
assume the reality of matter, energy, space, motion, time, the uni- 
formity of causation, the mathematical equivalence of causes and 
effects, the correspondence of the mental categories of number and 



4 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

magnitude with the facts of nature. They do not inquire 
critically how far these assumptions may be warranted, or how 
the mind can know that these so-called entities exist independently 
of the mind. They do not inquire critically into the relations 
between our sense perceptions and matter and energy regarded as 
permanent or substantial entities. Even the mathematician usu- 
ally assumes the infinitude of space, time and number, without a 
critical inquiry as to what infinitude may mean in these relations. 
The physicist and the chemist employ the doctrine of the conser- 
vation of energy without stopping to ask how this principle is to be 
squared with the infinite duration of the universe, the second law 
of thermo-dynamics, the apparently creative character of the 
evolutional life process, the belief in human personality and free- 
dom. A biologist may assume the uniqueness of the life processes 
without raising the question how this uniqueness comports with 
the mechanistic conception of the universe. Or a biologist may 
conduct his inquiries on the assumption that there is no difference 
between vital processes and mechanical processes, without stopping 
to inquire how the reduction of life to mechanism affects the 
position of human thought and human values in the world. A 
psychologist may study the conscious behavior of human beings and 
the relations of conscious behavior to unconscious behavior. He 
may treat the mind as a mere mechanism differing only in com- 
plexity from a crystal, for example, summarily dismissing the self 
or personality from court in any other sense than that of a physico- 
chemical mechanism. A sociologist may assume that the individ- 
ual's character and actions are the joint products of the physical 
and social environment; ignoring the problems of individuality, 
responsibility, freedom and creativeness ; whereas the moral agent, 
the teacher, the judge, the social administrator, assumes as his 
working hypothesis responsibility and freedom. 

When man as a reflective being stops to take stock of the uni- 
verse as a whole, of himself as a whole and of his place in the 
universe, he cannot be satisfied with jarring assumptions and 
doctrines. He must ask himself, "Am I really only a bit of 
cunning mechanism which has just chanced to occur as one of the 
infinite number of possible permutations and combinations of mass 
particles in a blind and meaningless process of things? Is my 
belief that I am a self-determining rational agent, an utter illusion ; 
and if so, how could this illusion have arisen ? Are the values, in 



WHAT IS METAPHYSICS? 5 

the seeking and achieving of which I seem to be satisfying the 
deepest instincts of my being — the values of knowing and contem- 
plating the spectacle of things, of creating and enjoying beauty, 
inner harmony and social harmony, the values of adding to the 
sum of knowledge and beauty, of the communion of souls in 
friendship and love, of loyalty to noble causes, of that communion 
with the nature of things which is religion at its highest — are all 
these values illusory and transitory by-products of the insensate 
mechanism of the universe ? 

A man may be a fairly good workman in field or factory or 
counting house, he may be a reputable citizen and a decent husband 
and father, he may be even a faithful pedestrian worker in science, 
without raising these questions. But if he lift his nose from the 
grindstone of his daily tasks to ask himself what is the good, what 
is the meaning, wherein consist the value and dignity of human 
life, he cannot help asking such questions. If he be content with a 
treadmill existence all his days, he need not philosophize. But if 
he raise the inner eye of thought to contemplate, however inter- 
mittently, the nature of his being, the meaning of the sum of things, 
and to consider his own place and destiny therein, he thereby 
becomes a metaphysician. Hence the perennial interest and justi- 
fication of metaphysics. One need not think seriously or 
obstinately in regard to the fundamental problems of human exist- 
ence; but, if one wishes reflectively to apprehend the meaning of 
human life and its place in the world, one must enter upon the 
pathway of metaphysical inquiry. For a whole nest of unques- 
tioned assumptions and beliefs is concealed not only in everyday 
practical knowledge and religious attitudes, but as well in the pro- 
cedures and conclusions of the various sciences. Every science and 
every form of practical activity is a special and abstract or one- 
sided way of dealing with the field of experience and reality. 
Every special science and practical activity involves assumptions 
or theories as to the meaning and place of its particular data, con- 
cepts and interests in the whole system of reality. Metaphysics 
corrects the abstractness and the inconsistency of these special 
assumptions and beliefs by aiming at the most complete and most 
consistent reflective interpretation of experience in its totality. 
Naive thought and belief, and science, which is a more rigorous 
analysis of special aspects of naive thought, are fragmentary and 
sometimes internally inconsistent in their results. The rational 



6 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

impulse impels us towards a coherent world view, which shall be 
at the same time a coherent life view. The one common presup- 
position of rational living and of philosophy is that the universe is 
in some sense a cosmos, an orderly or intelligible whole. Meta- 
physics asks whether this presupposition be justifiable. In our 
quest for a comprehensive and harmonious view we may have to 
put up with serious gaps. We may be able to discover only 
broken glimpses of the universal order; but, since the ultimate 
consistence or coherence of reality and its harmony with the gen- 
eral structure of human thought are postulates which gain better 
warrant the more we try to understand the world and our place in 
it, the metaphysical enterprise is justified. Since the realm of 
experience is a many-hued process, one must not expect to secure 
a world view cheaply, and the outline sketch of reality which meta- 
physics may afford will doubtless seem colorless and lifeless by 
contrast with the vivid hues of concrete experience. "Gmu, 
theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, und grim des Lebens goldner 
Baum." But at least one may hope to attain the satisfaction of 
knowing more clearly where one stands in regard both to the trust- 
worthiness, the limitations and the implications of human experi- 
ence and deed. And no clear or consistent notions are attainable 
on these points without metaphysics. 

II. The Method of Metaphysics 

Metaphysics takes its point of departure from the nature of 
human experience as a whole. Its methods are the a/mlysis of 
experience in its totality in order to determine its main features 
and their interconnections; and the synthesis of the results of 
analysis into a consistent and comprehensive conception of the 
meanings and implications of experience. Metaphysics can be a 
genuine intellectual procedure only in so far as it draws from 
actual experience and finds in actual experience the justification 
for its constructive work. Experience is always in flux and is 
fragmentary. Thought is impelled, when it is thoroughgoing, to 
comprehend the flux and to piece out the fragments into a har- 
monious whole. Every serious attempt to do this is a metaphysics. 
The philosopher is justified, since he is compelled by the urge of 
thought, in transcending actual experience in order to render com- 
plete and coherent the implications thereof. The problem as to y 



WHAT IS METAPHYSICS? 7 

how far, and in what directions, the philosopher is warranted in 
transcending the actual can only be solved by the whole course of 
metaphysical inquiry ; but, in view of the impermanence of experi- 
ence and the immense difficulties which confront the attempt to 
make it consistent in implication, only partial success can be ex- 
pected in this undertaking. "All things excellent are as difficult as 
they are rare" ; and this most excellent of things is most difficult. 
Often the claim is put forward that there is some peculiar 
method by which the problems of metaphysics are solved. M. 
Bergson has argued for the method of intuition or direct vision of 
life as the key to the solution of metaphysical questions, in contrast 
with the geometrizing and mechanizing procedure of the intellect. 
We shall examine this doctrine fully later on. Suffice it to say now 
that vision, feeling or direct experience, without interpretation, is 
neither science nor philosophy ; and that any proposal which would 
brush aside the tested methods by which the thought of mankind 
has advanced steadily, if slowly, is suspect. Fichte and Hegel 
employed the dialectic method. Briefly, this consists in finding in 
the development and overcoming of oppositions or contradictions 
in thought the key to the conception of reality as the absolute and 
harmonious and living synthesis in which all oppositions are taken 
up and reconciled, all contradictions healed. Undoubtedly the aim 
of metaphysics is the resolution of all oppositions, the annulment 
of all contradictions in a harmonious totality of insight. But this 
ideal does not give to the dialectic method the prerogative of being 
the method of philosophy. Its advocates have found their cue in 
the development of conscious selfhood and the social and spiritual 
development of mankind. To apply the dialectic method to the 
interpretation of nature, as well as of human culture, is to assume 
that the whole reality is the evolution of selfhood or personality. 
It is to assume the fundamental doctrine of metaphysical idealism 
or spiritualism. There may be grounds for regarding the develop- 
ment of selfhood as the most important clew to the meaning and 
purpose of reality. But the philosopher has no right to begin with 
such an assumption, nor even to assume that dialectical evolution 
furnishes a sufficient key to the nature and destiny of spirit or 
personality. We shall find occasion later, in connection with the 
study of personality, to consider more fully the meaning and value 
of the dialectical method. Suffice it to say now that we cannot 
accept it as the method of philosophy or metaphysics, since it is 



8 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

not relevant to the many other problems which belong to our study. 
If we could begin with the proposition that nothing is real except 
spirit or conscious selfhood, we might seriously consider whether 
we should not proceed wholly by the dialectic method. But we 
must begin with the obvious assumption that experience is the basis 
of metaphysics ; and it is by no means self-evident that experience 
not only is always owned by selves, but is of nothing except selves. 
Truly experience implies that I am as an experient, but it does 
not necessarily follow that whatever I experience is spirit and 
nothing but spirit. 

"There is experience," and "I, whatever else I may be, am an 
experiencing and thinking being" — such are the inevitable and 
indubitable propositions from which the metaphysician must start. 
He may doubt everything further — how experience comes to him, 
what it signifies, what more he himself is, whether there is any 
other self, whether anything is permanent, whether perhaps the 
world of his experience is not a dream and he the only dreamer, 
but he cannot doubt that he, the experient of the movement, is 
having experience and thinking about its meaning. In order to 
get forward he must analyze his experience to find what it con- 
tains and implies and then put together the results of his analysis. 
He must, as Descartes put it, analyze the complex data into the 
simplest attainable, begin with the simplest and most obvious, pro- 
ceed step by step and make sure that nothing has been omitted. 
Intellectual analysis of the data, inductive generalization there- 
from, and deductive synthesis checked up by further analysis of 
data — such are the elements of genuine intellectual procedure in 
every field. And such are the elements of philosophical method. 
The only important difference between science and metaphysics, 
with regard to method and scope, is this — metaphysics is an analy- 
sis of the widest or most general inductions of experience and a 
synthesis of these into a coherent system of thought, whereas a 
special science limits itself to an analysis and synthesis of some 
particular aspect of experience, such as measurable, ponderable 
and experimentable physical qualities, or the phenomena of living 
matter, or the social behavior of human beings. 

In the metaphysical analysis of experience the problem of 
knowledge has come, in modern times, to occupy a central and 
determining place. The rapid change and increase in special 
scientific theory of nature and man, in sharp contrast and often in 



WHAT IS METAPHYSICS? 9 

contradiction with man's naive and traditional beliefs in regard to 
his own nature, vocation and destiny, has made the problem of 
truth an acute and critical one for the determination of man's place 
in the universe. Consequently I shall approach the other main 
problems of metaphysics through the problem of knowledge. It is 
impossible to progress rationally in the consideration of the nature 
of personality and values, and their place in the world order, and 
with the problem of the structure and the meaning of reality as a 
whole without settling accounts with the problem of knowledge. 
On the other hand knowledge is only one function of personality. 
In the actual movement of reflective life it is interwoven with feel- 
ings and valuations, with impulses and volitions. The world that 
I must start with is the world of my own experience. But I do 
not reflect this world passively as a colorless knower, or even 
actively grind it into categories like a logical machine. I feel its 
sting and sweetness, I react to its impacts and solicitations at the 
same time that I try to understand it. No theory of man's nature 
and his place in reality can be adequate which treats these various 
aspects of the concrete and living movement of individual experi- 
ence in isolation from one another, or which elevates one aspect to 
a privileged position by ignoring the others. I shall, perforce, for 
purposes of discussion, have to isolate knowledge, valuation, and 
volition. But the reader is asked to bear in mind that this is an 
artificial isolation for purposes of investigation. 

Experience, as the primary datum of metaphysics, is always 
individual — yours or mime. The individual's experience is the 
window through which he views reality, or perhaps better, the point 
at which reality acts on him and he reacts on it. Whatever con- 
clusion one may reach as to the dependence of the individual 
experient and agent on the world (inclusive of the physical order 
and other selves) can be valid only if it takes account of the indi- 
viduated character of experience. 

There are various ways of approach to the central problems of 
metaphysics. One might begin from any of the starting points 
aforementioned. One might begin with the ultimate problems of 
the physical order and of natural science (metaphysics of nature), 
or of the mental order and psychology (metaphysics of psychology) , 
or of ethics, aesthetics and religion (metaphysics of values), or of 
the place of knowledge in reality (epistemology). I have chosen to 
begin with the latter problems, to proceed from them to the prob- 



10 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

lems of the general structure of the physical order, then to the 
problems of self and of values, or metaphysics of personality and 
of society, concluding with the problems of general metaphysics 
or cosmology, that is, of the meaning of reality as a whole. ,1 
have dealt with the problems of the philosophy of nature, i.e., of 
the metaphysics of physics and biology, only as incidental to the 
carrying out of my purpose. I have not aimed at a complete treat- 
ment of all metaphysical questions. My aim is rather to discuss 
the main problems and theories in the light of the central problems 
of personality and values. 

I have described the aim of metaphysics to be the attainment 
of a synthetic or synoptic interpretation of the meaning of experi- 
ence in its wholeness. To me the classical tradition in philosophy 
is essentially right in regarding the heart of philosophy to be the 
striving for a coherent and adequate conception of reality as a 
whole. And such a conception is to be attained by the analytical 
interrogation of all the main aspects of human experience and the 
synthetic organization into a coherent conception of the results of 
analysis. I do not pretend to any acquaintance with a reality that 
may exist as such, apart and entirely different from our human 
world. The only world concerning which I have any knowledge is 
the world of experience that is revealed to and in human selves. 
This world is what it is through the reactions of selves to the com- 
mon physical conditions of their existence. As an individual self 
I am constrained to recognize that my experience, both active and 
passive, is conditioned by qualities of which I must take account. 
These qualities are physical. Moreover, inasmuch as I am a social 
being, one who experiences and acts only as a member of a com- 
munity of selves, I am led to recognize that physical qualities are 
objective to the community no less than to me as an individual. 
But human feelings and strivings, human values and purposes, hu- 
man thoughts and human acts, are just as real parts of the world of 
experience as are physical qualities. I hold, therefore, that no phil- 
osophical account of the world is complete which ignores the prob- 
lems of the meaning and place in reality of human values and pur- 
poses, human thoughts and acts. The central problem of philosophy 
or metaphysics, the one problem into which all other problems merge, 
is the nature of human personality and its place in the universe. 

The above conception of the function and method of systematic 
philosophy is contested by some members of a vigorous and impor- 



WHAT IS METAPHYSICS? 11 

tant school of present day thought — the new realists. The writers 
of this school by no means agree among themselves. I shall take 
Mr. Bertrand Eussell as the most vigorous and interesting exponent 
of the neorealistic conception. His views are clearly expressed in 
his books — Mysticism and Logic and Our Knowledge of the Ex- 
ternal Worlds Mr. Eussell holds that philosophy has gone astray 
hitherto by attempting to find satisfaction for human desires, by 
peeking to show that human values have some standing in the 
universe; in other words by seeking a cosmical justification of 
man's longing for the satisfaction of his desires for happiness and 
for some lasting good. This philosophical attitude he calls mysti- 
cism. It has resulted in repeated and vain attempts at synthetic 
views of reality, in "large untested generalities recommended only 
by a certain appeal to the imagination." Mr. Eussell would 
banish the problem of values from philosophy. The latter must 
become ethically neutral; must dissociate itself entirely from 
ethics and religion, and align itself with the standpoint and 
method of science. The only fruitful method for philosophy is the 
logical analysis of familiar but complex things. Let it have done 
with the vain question as to the nature of reality as a whole and 
confine itself to the logical analysis of such problems as the nature 
of thought, of judgment, belief and inference, in the abstract, and 
the nature of our knowledge of the external world. Philosophy is 
identical with Logic, "the science of the possible/' It is concerned 
only with the universal propositions of abstract or symbolic logic, 
v with logical forms and their relations. Logic, says Mr. Eussell, 
consists of two parts. "The first part investigates what proposi- 
tions are and what forms they may have ; the second part consists 
of certain supremely general propositions, which assert the truth 
of all propositions of certain forms." 2 

In reply I would point out that while philosophy begins with 
analysis — the analysis of human experience in its most general 
aspects — its goal is a rational synthesis. I contest the view that 
the special sciences are purely analytical. They begin with the 
analysis of special aspects of the empirical world. But synthesis 
goes hand in hand with analysis, in science no less than in philos- 
ophy. The aim of biology, physics or chemistry is, by patient 

1 See especially Lectures i and ii in Our Knowledge of the External World, 
and the Essays entitled "Mysticism and Logic,' ' and "On Scientific Method 
in Philosophy." 

2 Our Knowledge of the External World, p. 57. 



12 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

analysis, to arrive at some wide-reaching generalization which 
organizes into a coherent system the facts discovered by analysis. 
The synthesis may not be final ; it may require revision, but it is a 
fruitful and stimulating instrument for further inquiry no less 
than it is a systematic comprehension of already ascertained facts. 
Where would biology be to-day without the principle of natural 
selection or of adaptation? Where would physics be without the 
principle of gravitation or of the conservation of energy? Or 
chemistry without the periodic law ? Is not Einstein's theory of 
relativity a vast synthesis which is provoking fresh analyses ? The 
progress of every special science involves partial and provisional 
syntheses. Philosophy or metaphysics is the endeavor after a 
comprehensive synthesis. 

Philosophy is not the science of the possible, it is the science 
of the real, that is of the actual and the ideal in their relations. 
For ideas and ideals are real; values and purposes are real and 
efficacious. Man's social, ethical, affectional, aesthetic and religious 
valuations are just as good facts, in the empirical sense, as are 
inertia, electricity, or light in the physical order ; and the former 
order of facts plays an even larger role in human life than the 
latter. Any procedure which would rule out from the court of 
philosophy the consideration of personal life and its values is very 
one-sided. Indeed, all the sciences, in their origin and develop- 
ment, are the products of the human quest for the satisfaction of 
values. Mathematics and physics, no less than art, poetry and 
religion, result from man's insatiable desire to realize his spiritual 
life by attuning his personality to the order of the universe. Even 
Mr. Russell proclaims the joyous satisfactions of creating and con- 
templating the beautiful realm of clear and distinct, well-ordered, 
precise, and eternally stable logical entities, in contrast with the 
heartless and confused world of brute matter. His science of the 
possible, like the world of the musician, affords his spirit a refuge 
from this troubled empirical world. It is the creation of a unique 
and gifted spirit. It satisfies a desire which is caviar to the 
general. He is a logical mystic. 

If man and his values are utterly incongruous with the nature 
of the universe, as Mr. Russell maintains, 3 we are indeed in a 
paradoxical situation. Man is that part of nature, that focus in 
the natural order, in which the creative energies of nature "come 

•See "The Free Man's Worship" in Mysticism and Logic. 



WHAT IS METAPHYSICS? 13 

alive," as Mr. Bosanquet puts it. In man nature or the universe 
comes to valuing and purposive consciousness; in man nature 
attains to effective and significant individuality. How then can 
man be an utter alien, a homeless excrescence, an unaccountable 
eruption, in the universe which has borne him? Either human 
nature in its totality is a genuine key to the nature of things, or 
the universe is cut in two with a hatchet. In the present work it 
will be maintained that human experience means a dynamic and 
fruitful intercourse between man and the world, that reality 
acquires meaning and value in his life, and conversely, that mean- 
ing and value inhere in reality. In order to be just to the full 
meaning of human experience microscopic analysis must be taken 
up into an imaginative synthesis. The philosopher is required to be 
ethically neutral in the sense of being as objective and open-minded 
as possible. But experience is not neutral; and as for a neutral 
thinker — "there is no such animal," not even Mr. Bertrand Kussell. 



APPENDIX 

PHENOMENOLOGY AS THE SCIENCE OF PURE CONSCIOUSNESS 

Professor Edmund Husserl, in a series of works, 4 claims to lay 
the foundation of philosophy as a strict science and, for the first 
time, to formulate the methods and map out the way by which alone 
philosophy can proceed on the certain path of science. In view of 
this claim (which recalls Kant's similar claim) and of the acute 
elaboration and voluminousness of Husserl's work (the works 
enumerated total nearly fourteen hundred large octavo pages), it 
seems desirable to take some account of it here. Besides his own 
immediate disciples and collaborators, Husserl has influenced the 
psychologists, Th. Lipps and 0. Kiilpe and his school, 5 as well as a 
number of other philosophers and psychologists. 

*Logische Untersuchungen, second revised edition, Erster Band und 
Zweiter Band, i Teil, 1913; Zweiter Band, ii Teil, 1921: Ideen zu einer 
reinen Phanomenologie und phdnomenologischen PMlosophie in Jahrouch fur 
Philosophie und phdnomenologische Forschung (edited by Husserl in coopera- 
tion with M. Geiger, A. Pfander, A. Reinach and M. Scheler), Erster Band, 
Teil i, 1913, also Sonderabdruck, 1913; and Philosophie als strenge Wissen- 
schaft, in Logos, Vol. I. 

6 Cf. the brief but remarkably thorough survey of this psychological move- 
ment by E. B. Titchener in the American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 33, No. i, 
pp. 43-84. The whole movement has its source in Franz Brentano, Psychologie 
vom empirischen StandpunMe, Band i, 1874. Titchener calls it, happily, ' ' The 
Psychology of Act." 



14 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

Husserl opens his Logische Untersuchungen Q with a vigorous and 
effective polemic against "Psychologism," by which is meant the 
standpoint of those who would ground the validity of logical prin- 
ciples solely on the mental processes of human beings. This attitude, 
argues Husserl, reduces all science to mere subjective empirical prob- 
ability and does not afford even a mathematical foundation for a 
theory of probability. Pure logic is the exposition of the essences or 
universal forms that every theoretical science necessarily possesses. 
Thus pure logic is the purely formal (eidetic) science which deals 
with the a priori forms which are the ideal presuppositions of all 
possible science. But it is not methodology; it is not concerned with 
the ideal conditions of the empirical sciences. It deals with the 
"universals" or "meanings" of pure thought. It is the "theory of 
theories" or theory of knowledge. The objects of thought, whether 
actually embodied as are the objects of physical or psychological sci- 
ence, or ideal as are the objects of mathematics or ethical valuation, 
have a being or validity independent of empirically conditioned psy- 
chical processes. Thus Husserl opposes a outrance all forms of sub- 
jectivism, mentalism or "phenomenalism" in the usual sense of the 
latter term. 7 Husserl's epistemological standpoint has some affinities 
with the American and English Neo-realists, although I should 
expect his metaphysical standpoint to be quite different. There is 
even more affinity between Husserl and Meinong's Gegenstands- 
theorie. 

Husserl's conception of phenomenology is radically different from 
that of Hegel. The latter is a culture-psychological interpretation 
of the development of mind, in which the epochs in the historical 
development of culture are interwoven with the theory of the devel- 
opment of the individual mind. In Hegel's own terms, the meaning 
of "subjective mind" is interpreted in terms of "objective mind" 
(social mind). Phenomenology, for Husserl, is the purely descrip- 
tive analysis of vital experience (Erlebniss) from the standpoint of 
consciousness in general or pure consciousness, Husserl uniformly 
uses the term Erlebniss rather than Erfahrung; I suppose since the 
latter term, like its English equivalent, is empiristic and even sen- 
sationalistic in implication; it might be "neutral," that is, not imply 
a subject; as indeed it does not in Avenarius, James and the neutral 
monists who follow him (B. Eussell is now to be counted among the 



•Hereafter the Logische Untersuchungen will be referred to as L. V. and 
the Ideen zu einer reinen Phdnomenologie as Ideen, 

* M. Scheler has, in the Jdhrhuch, Bande i and ii, a very fine treatment 
of the problems of ethies — Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materials 
WertetWc; A. Pfander in Band iv a fine treatment of logic. 



WHAT IS METAPHYSICS? 15 

neutral monists; see his Analysis of Mind). The distinction between 
the popular sense of experience and the phenomenological sense is 
that in the popular mind experience is not psychical, says Husserl. 
While, for sake of brevity, I shall translate "Mrlebniss" by "Experi- 
ence/' let it be borne in mind that Husserl means by it "vital ex- 
perience," "consciousness" and that, for him, this implies always a 
subject or "pure ego." The relation between the subject of experience 
and the empirical self or personality has not, thus far, been discussed 
fully by Husserl. I imagine he would be prepared to say that the 
self has some sort of enduring reality. I base this surmise on certain 
remarks inter alia in the Ideen. While in the L. U. Husserl rejected 
the pure ego as a superfluity and regarded the phenomenological 
ego as nothing more than the experienced interconnections in the 
content of consciousness or empirical unity of consciousness, in the 
Ideen he accepts the pure ego as the implicate of all acts. The world 
has a presumptive reality, the ego has absolute reality (Ideen, p. 
86). By itself the ego is indescribable; nevertheless it is present in 
every mental act. But, at the start, phenomonology can leave the 
ego out of consideration and begin with the fundamental fact that 
"every experience of the stream (of consciousness), that the reflective 
look may probe into, has its own unique essence which can be intui- 
tively apprehended, a content that can be regarded in its own unique- 
ness." 

The method of phenomenology is "immanent inspection," the 
contemplation of essence (Wesenerschauung) ; it apprehends and 
analyzes the data of consciousness by reflective intuition; it is the 
universal eidetic science, the science of the forms or essences of pure 
consciousness as revealed by an analysis of the acts of the ego. Phe- 
nomenology brackets (einklamm&rt) all empirical data and the special 
sciences which deal therewith. It is not concerned with the tran- 
scendent or metaphysical reality of the physical or psychical or their 
relations. It deals with, the immediate and immanent data of pure 
consciousness. Like geometry, in the special field of space relations, 
phenomenology, as the universal science of thought-forms, cares not 
for "existents"; its concern is with essences alone. 

Starting from the naive world view phenomenology reduces or 
brackets, by elimination (Auschaltung) , the specific individuations 
of particular fields of experience and thought, even of mathematics; 
what is left is the "absolute or transcendental consciousness" which 
is not an empirical reality. Phenomenology describes the essences 
or universal forms and connections of pure consciousness. In so doing 
it makes use of the eliminated elements as examples, but without 
reference to their "reality." Thus it is not concerned with the ques- 



16 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

tion of the ultimate nature of physical things, animal life, or the 
empirical self or with the metaphysical status of values. It abstracts 
from the fact that consciousness inhabits animal bodies which are 
in interaction with other bodies. It takes account only of phenomenal 
time and space, that is, of time and space as forms of consciousness. 
It does not, of course, deny that there are cosmic time and space ; but 
the problem of the relation between phenomenal and cosmic or 
objective time and space belongs to metaphysics, just as do the prob- 
lems of the nature of the physical world and the relation of the 
physical, the psychical and the value realms. Phenomenology is 
logically preliminary to the special sciences as well as to logic, to the 
philosophy of values and of culture, and of course, to metaphysics. 
Husserl means, by the assertion that phenomenology is the indis- 
pensable precondition of philosophy as a science, that its thorough 
descriptive analysis must precede all theory of science, ethics, meta- 
physics and the philosophy of culture (philosophies of the state, 
religion, art, etc.). With especial reference to metaphysics the fol- 
lowing statement is significant: "The world is never experienced by 
the thinker. Experience is that which means the world; the world 
itself is the intended object" (L. V., Vol. II, Chap. 2, p. 387). 
"Consciousness means beyond the actually experienced" (op. cit., p. 
41). "The thing transcends perception" (Ideen, p. 75). "There is 
a fundamental difference between being as experience and being as 
thing" (Ideen, p. 75). The external object is not immanent in 
consciousness. What exist in experience are nuances, adumbrations 
or modifications (Abschattungen) of an object. This is true whether 
the object be perceived or imagined. If I perceive or imagine my 
desk ; in either case, there are an indefinite number of possible nuances 
or adumbrations, in which I, or some other person, might see it. The 
actual percepts or images are nuances of the real object ("real" in 
the phenomenological sense) ; but the object does not differ entirely 
from its nuances. In every fulfillment of intention or meaning there 
is a becoming intuited (Veranschaulichung) (L. U., Vol. II, Chap. 
2, p. 65). "Every perception and imagination is a web of partial 
intentions fused into a unity of total intention. The correlate of the 
latter is the thing" (L. JJ ., Vol. II, Chap. 2, p. 41). (In this respect 
Husserl's doctrine is very like that of the present writer.) This 
principle holds true, whatever be the character of the thing which 
is apprehended in or through its nuances (Abschattungen) . We must 
beware of supposing that the nuances "appear"; they do not appear, 
as though they were phenomena of something entirely different behind 
them. "The thing-appearance is not the appearing thing. . . . The 
appearances do not appear; they are experienced" (L. TJ., Vol. II, 



WHAT IS METAPHYSICS? 17 

Chap. 1, p. 350) ; in them, thus far, the thing is experienced. This 
is an expressly, almost naively, realistic doctrine. 

In the phenomenological analysis of experience the fundamental 
distinction is that of the act {AH), matter or meaning -content 
(Bedeutungsgehalt) and "object" (Gegenstand). 8 The act is always 
intentional; alike in cognition, valuation and practical activity. The 
act varies in quality; one can think, represent, imagine, assert, etc., 
the same thing. The act means or intends the "object," whether 
theoretical or practical; and it means the "object" through the con- 
tent. "Object" is the name for the essential connections (Wesenszu- 
sammenh'dnge) of consciousness (Ideen, p. 302). In perception, for 
example, the percept is not the act; it is meaning-determining but 
not meaning-containing (L. U., Vol. II, Chap. 2, p. 15). The act 
of knowledge is grounded on the act of perception. Significance lies 
in meaning. There is a distinction between immanent and transcends 
ent acts. In immanent acts (that is, in self -observation or intro- 
spective analysis of one's own states) the intentional objects belong 
to the same stream of experience as the act. In transcendent acts, as 
when I interpret the inner life of another self or a physical event, the 
act is transcendent since the object transcends my experience-stream. 

In short, consciousness is always of something. In the "of" is 
contained (1) the act of being conscious; (2) the "object" of which 
consciousness is; and (3) the significant content through which one 
is conscious of the object. 

In the case of experience of things other than the experient's own 
inner states, the distinction between the three moments of intentional, 
that is, meaning-directed, consciousness is clear and obvious. In the 
case of inner experiences it is not always clear, since the content and 
the "object" here coincide more closely; although not completely, 
since the very intuitive "look within" or introspection discovers a 
distinction. Moreover, we can mean the same inner experience or 
attitude, the same image valuation volition or affection, by different 
contents. I may, at different times, purpose or affirm the same values 
in different psychical settings, with varying nuances. Husserl holds 
that even the same sensation-content can be apprehended differently 
(L. U., Vol. II, Chap. 2, p. 381). An act does not, he explicitly 
says, imply an activity of the ego. The term is not to be taken in the 
Aristotelian or scholastic sense of actus. From act the thought of 
activation is absolutely excluded (L. U., Vol. II, Chap. 21, p. 379). 
But he speaks very often as though the act were the expression of 
psychical activity. I think the term "act" is an unfortunate one. 

'Wherever object is in quotation marks herein it is the translation of 
Gegenstand. 



18 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

"Attitude" seems to me a much less misleading term. I would assent 
to the doctrine that every cognitive process, including fancy and 
imagination, as well as every affection valuation or volition, whether 
having external reference or not, is an attitude of the ego. In some 
of its attitudes the ego is passive. 

Husserl holds that there are intentional "feelings" or "affects," 
but also that there are nonintentional feelings. The latter he prefers 
to call affective sensations (Gefuhlsempfindungen) in contrast with 
affective acts (Gefiihlsakte) (L. TJ., Vol. II, Chap. 1, pp. 389 ff.). 
That not all experiences are intentional is shown by an examination of 
sensations and sensation-complexes. For example, the parts of my 
present visual field, though components of my experience, are not 
intended by me as such. They are not present as such in my con- 
sciousness. He doubts whether even every psychical phenomenon is 
an "object" of inner consciousness. In all cases the truly immanent 
contents that belong to real constituents of the intentional experience 
are not "intentional." They are the constitutive factors of the act, 
but not the "object" presented in the act; for example, I do not see 
color sensation but colored things. When I make appreciations of my 
own feelings or attitudes, I do not feel feelings of worth or unworth ; 
I estimate definite concrete states of consciousness. Husserl insists 
that, if self-observation be impossible, psychology is impossible. 
Psychology deals with data of inner experience in their concrete 
varied empirical forms; whereas phenomenology deals with their 
essential and universal connections, with the "forms" or laws of 
inward-directed experience as well as of outward-directed experience. 
Phenomenology encompasses the whole natural world and all the ideal 
worlds (of mathematics, logic, value- and culture-sciences) as "world- 
meaning" through their essential characters of order (Ideen, pp. 302, 
303). 

Husserl, in the Ideen, Section II, treats, at some length, the gen- 
eral problem of the relation of Eeason and Eeality. This subject also 
receives some treatment in the L. U., Vol. II, Chap. 2. An intentional 
"object," or object as meant, is called in the Ideen a noema. The 
content of a noema is its "sense" or meaning (Sinn). The act of 
reason is called a noesis. The distinction is made between assertory 
and apodictic evidence and insight. The basis of truth is taken to be 
"originary givenness" (originare Gegebenheit), the assertoric seeing 
or insight. All necessity or apodicity in judgments is made to rest, in 
the last analysis, on the originary intuition or insight. Mediate or 
synthetic judgments rest on immediate or reflectively intuited judg- 
ments. 

Husserl has not yet discussed in detail the logic of inference, nor 



WHAT IS METAPHYSICS? 19 

has he indicated whether, and, if so, how, he would formulate a con- 
ception of reality as a whole in the metaphysical sense ; but it seems 
evident, from the general drift of his discussion, as well as from 
specific remarks, that whatever has reality must be a possible "object" 
(Gegenstand) of conscious meaning. The most natural metaphysical 
implication of his theory would be an objective idealism. The world 
of things and events presupposes consciousness; its being is the ful- 
fillment of the meanings of consciousness. Koyce's doctrine that 
reality is the complete fulfillment of the internal meanings of ideas 
would fit into Husserl's theory. 

The whole procedure of phenomenology is reflectively intuitive. 
There is no use made of induction, except in the sense of the use of 
examples to illustrate or body forth intuitive insights; neither dia- 
lectic reasoning nor the method of deductive coherence is employed. 
The "principle of principles" is this — "Every originary dator intuition 
is a justificatory source of knowledge, and everything in the intuition 
which offers itself as originary (so to speak in its bodily reality) is 
simply to be accepted as it presents itself, but only within the limits 
in which it presents itself. This no conceivable theory can make us 
doubt" (Ideen, pp. 43, 44). We must see the essential natures and 
connections or forms, just as we see that 2 + 1 = 1 + 2. "Seeing 
in general, as the originary dator consciousness of whatever kind, is 
the final justificatory source (Bechtsquelle) of all rational assertion" 
(Ideen,$. 36). 

There are three serious difficulties in the reading of Husserl, quite 
apart from the difficulty, to which he himself frequently alludes, 
encountered in so thorough and profound an investigation. The 
first is the coining of new terminology. (This is not a criticism.) 
The second is the overelaboration and repetition, sometimes from 
somewhat different angles and sometimes without obvious reasons, of 
points of doctrine ; Husserl runs at times into a confusing verbalism. 9 
The third is that the various partial investigations, covering nearly 
1400 printed pages, are nowhere focused together; the work shows a 
lack of synthesis or organization. I suppose Husserl would say this 
difficulty is unavoidable in laying the first foundations of a scientific 
philosophy. On the subjects of "Expression and Meaning," "The 
Ideal Unity of Species," "The Doctrine of Whole and Part," and 
other subjects, the Logische Untersuchungen contains very valuable 
discussions. I cannot quite see, however, that Husserl has founded 
a new science which is the exclusive forecourt of philosophy. I think 

*Dr. A. R. Chandler's criticism on this score is fully deserved. Cf. his 
excellent article — "Professor HusserPs Program of Philosophic Eeform/' 
Philosophical Beview, Vol. xxvi (1917), pp. 634-648. 



20 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

he has made some very important contributions to a descriptive 
analytic psychology of knowledge and, thus, to logic. The question 
whether his procedure is to be called a descriptive psychology of mental 
forms or phenomenology seems to me purely terminological. In any 
case it contributes important prolegomena to logic. I agree with 
Bosanquet's criticism (Implication and Linear Reference, Chap. VII) 
that Husserl's complete separation of Logic from Psychology leads, 
in principle, to the same divorce of thought and reality to which 
psychologism leads. It is doubtless worth while to regard the knowing 
and other "intentional" processes in the formal-analytic manner, by 
abstraction from, by a bracketing" of, the concrete details and prob- 
lems of the existential sciences. But phenomenology is a peculiarly 
"abstract" way of regarding consciousness, and we must not forget 
its abstractions; otherwise one will be led, as Husserl is, into hair- 
splitting subtleties that at times get nowhere. To paraphrase Lotze, 
the knife is sometimes at least being sharpened to cut the empty air. 
A theory of knowledge is, in effect and all along the line, a theory 
of the meanings of reality in the sense of existence. The one all- 
inclusive problem of philosophical system is the interpretation of 
existence in its most universal and self -coherent meanings. There can 
be omitted from the metaphysics of knowledge special details of the 
metaphysics of nature and the metaphysics of mind; but, "without 
general metaphysics no theory of knowledge," is to me a first principle 
in philosophy. As knowledge, experience means more than it is as 
fact. It transcends itself, and that very self-transcendence requires 
that, in the analysis of experience, we shall keep in mind both the 
existential order, which immediately is experience in its personal and 
cosmical interrelations, and the consistent completion of this order by 
way of implied principle. I do not yet see how the various isolated 
parts of phenomenological inquiry dovetail into a synthetic interpreta- 
tion of experience as immediate reality. Nor do I see how phenomen- 
ology can become philosophy without transcending itself in a theory 
of reality. When it does this it seems to me that many of the 
phenomenological analyses will turn out to have been a rather super- 
fluous process of overelaborated and abstruse word-technic. Philos- 
ophy cannot enter upon the sure road of science by way of 
phenomenological abstraction, any more than by way of dialectical 
legerdemain. The one sure and safe road for philosophy is to bring 
into intimate association, and to organize into the greatest possible 
coherence and unity, the main insights of the concrete sciences, prac- 
tical life and human evaluation. I do not look, with eager expectancy, 
for a better metaphysics founded on phenomenology. We must 
remain content with imperfect and approximate world views; to 



WHAT IS METAPHYSICS? 21 

which, to some extent, the personal equation of the thinker and, to a 
greater extent, the spiritual climate of a culture-epoch contribute. 
At best a philosophy is the total synthetic reaction of a reflective 
open-minded student to the facts of common human experience as 
these appear in terms of the "categories, " the fundamental modes of 
judgment of a whole culture system. The personal equation and the 
historical culture attitude enter even into mathematics and physics. 
Since the interests which the philosopher would serve and the material 
in which he works are much richer and more confusing than those of 
the physical or mathematical sciences, it is no counsel of despair, nay 
rather an expression of the human value of his subject, that leads a 
student of philosophy to recognize the inevitable incompleteness and 
one-sidedness of even his own philosophy and to acknowledge that he 
cannot think things out in a cell hermetically proof against the culture 
in which his spirit lives, moves and has its being. 

Perhaps, however, I have done injustice to the originality of the 
Husserlian movement. Perhaps it will issue in a truly scientific 
philosophy. It may be my own stupidity which prevents me from 
discerning in it the primary foundations of scientific metaphysics. 



BOOK I 
THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 



CHAPTEK II 



WHAT IS THINKING 



One of the classical problems of modern philosophy is the 
question of the place of thinking in the real universe and, by 
consequence, since knowledge is the product of thinking, the ques- 
tion of the place of knowledge in reality. The name epistemology , 
meaning theory of knowledge, is given to inquiries of this sort. 

Since my purpose here is systematic, and not historical, I shall 
make only such historical references as may be incidental to the 
^discussion of the problem itself. 

The problem is not a simple one. On analysis it breaks up into 
the following problems: (1) What is thfoiking, considered as the 
activity by which truth is achieved? (2) What are the marks or 
criteria of true thinking, or under what conditions is knowledge 
possible? (3) What is the status of truth or knowledge in the 
order of reality, or the relation between the knowing mind and the 
objects to which knowledge refers ? I shall now discuss these prob- 
lems in the order given. 

The most elementary act or process of thinking is judgment. 
Judgments are expressed or symbolized in propositions. For 
example, "this room is cold" is a judgment expressed in the 
system of symbols which constitute a proposition in the words of 
the English language ; u x = y" is a judgment expressed in a 
proposition consisting of algebraic symbols. I shall use the terms 
judgment and proposition as equivalent ; since, logically, a proposi- 
tion is an expressed judgment. The grammatical treatment of 
propositions as sentences does not concern us here. 

Judgments are objective in reference. A true judgment is one 
that would be true for any percipient and thinker under the same 
conditions. This is obviously the case with judgments concerning 
the external world or scientific principles. But it is just as true 
of judgments concerning the subjective states of individuals. If 
it be true that I am now suffering from headache, it is true for all 

25 



26 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

thinkers in the sense that any one in my position would know it to 
be a fact. The objects of judgment are particular facts and factual 
relations or connections of particulars. 

Actually, as made and held by thinkers, judgments may be 
false as well as true. The meaning-content or objective of a judg- 
ment is as such neither true nor false. It is simply what it is. 1 
The meaning of a judgment might be called, as Meinong calls it, 
a "supposal." One can entertain meanings or ideas without taking 
any attitude towards their truth or falsity; in fact one can have 
meaningless images or impossible and contradictory notions. One 
can have mere ideas or presentations (Y orsteUungen) and one can 
make judgments. Making a judgment is always a a Yes — No" 
attitude on the part of the individual making it. He either affirms 
a meaning directly, or he affirms a meaning indirectly by denying 
its contradictory. To apprehend the meaning of an idea is one 
thing; to affirm its truth is another, 2 A judgment, in contrast 
with mere apprehension, is a belief. Of course it is an inherenl 
tendency of the human mind to believe every idea presented to it 
(this tendency Bain calls "Primitive Credulity") ; still we d( 
entertain and apprehend the meanings of ideas without assent to, 
or dissent from their claim to truth ; indeed, it is a sure mark of 
the cultivated mind to be able to entertain a large company of 
ideas without believing in them. This raises the question, what is 
the distinction and relation between judgment and belief? 

There is no fixed usage for the term "belief." Some writers, 
such as Sir William Hamilton, make a disjunction of belief and 
knowledge; beliefs are those propositions which are accepted as 
true on other grounds than empirical or rational evidence; we 
believe where we do not know and cannot prove. Others (and the 
larger number, I think) make belief the more inclusive term; in 
this sense, all meanings accepted or embraced are beliefs. Inas- 
much as the greater part of our knowledge, so-called, consists of 
propositions which we believe on grounds that furnish only a 

1 1 may call attention here to the important contributions to the psychology 
and logic of judgment and meaning made by Brentano, Meinong and Husserl in 
German and by Bradley, Bosanquet and Stout in English. Cf. also, the 
symposium, * ( The Meaning of Meaning, * ' at the Oxford International Congress 
of Philosophy by Schiller, Eussell and others. Eussell's view of meaning is 
indicated in his Analysis of Mind. Schiller's paper will be found in Mind N. S., 
Vol. xxx, No. 118. 

2 Franz Brentano made this distinction very clearly in Psychologie vom 
empirischen Standpunkte, Band I, Buch U, Chap. 7, pp. 266 ff. 



WHAT IS THINKING? 27 

greater or less degree of probability in tbeir favor, and we have 
certain knowledge of but few things, I think that I am in harmony 
both with the prevailing usage and with the actual situation as to 
human knowledge in using the term "belief to designate the sub- 
jective or individual attitude m affirming or accepting the truth 
of a judgment or proposition. Subjectively, beliefs are judg- 
ments ; objectively, true beliefs are true judgments, that is, judg- 
ments whose meanings or "objectives" (in Meinong's sense) agree 
with the facts. A true belief is the assent of the mind to a true 
judgment or its dissent from a false judgment ; a false belief is the 
assent of the mind to a false judgment or its dissent from a true 
judgment. Thus, for logic and theory of knowledge, the distinc- 
tion between belief as a psychical attitude and the objective status 
of the content or meaning of the belief is most important. We 
must distinguish between two questions : 1. The question of fact — 
what motives actually lead individuals to believe in certain proposi- 
tions, and to disbelieve in others ; 2. The question of right — what 
are the objective principles or criteria to which beliefs must con- 
form in order to be true, what really makes them true ? The first 
question is that of the psychology of belief, a very interesting and 
important subject, into which we need not enter here ; although it 
is worth while to indicate, summarily, the chief grounds which 
actually motivate human beliefs. The second question is the 
fundamental problem of logic and epistemology ; the problem of 
the criteria of truth, which will receive fuller consideration in our 
fourth and subsequent chapters. The identification of the second 
problem with the first is "psychologism" or "subjectivism" (some- 
times called "subjective idealism") in theory of knowledge. If the 
enumeration of the motives which actually do lead people to believe 
propositions be the only account that can be given of the legitimate 
grounds of belief, it is clear that every individual has an equally 
good right to believe whatever suits him and there can be no other 
criteria of truth than mental habit and feeling. On the other hand, 
since, unless we admit right off the bat the absolute authority of 
some divine revelation, we can only interrogate human experience 
in order to find objective criteria of truth, it is difficult for the 
logician or epistemologist to avoid falling into psychologism. As 
we shall see more clearly later on, the strength and weakness of 
pragmatism lie in its constant appeal to experience and its inability 
to avoid subjectivism. 



28 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

David Hume is the grandfather of all modern subjectivists. 
He defined belief as consisting in "a lively idea related to or asso- 
ciated with a present impression." He says that it is chiefly the 
force j or vivacity, or solidity, or firmness, or steadiness of ideas 
which determine belief in them. 3 He overlooks the fact that we 
may have firm, forcible, vivacious, steady ideas of entities which 
we believe to be fictitious; and weak, vague, flickering ideas of 
entities which we believe to be real. 

If two persons do not mean the same thing by the same prop- 
osition, they may have the same belief while thinking that they 
disagree, or they may disagree while thinking that they agree. 
The real objective or content of a belief is the meaning of the 
proposition. What meaning means will engage our attention 
frequently. Suffice it to say here that it is a quality or 
group of qualities in relation, either existing or derived from 
existents (Meinong's "objects" of lower and higher order, re- 
spectively). 

Belief in propositions may be based on one or more of the 
following motives: (1) The influence of tradition and social 
suggestion. Man is a highly suggestible, and therefore credulous, 
animal. Many of our beliefs are based simply on the authority of 
institutions or persons or on mass suggestion. The family, the 
church, our associates, prominent and influential persons, or the 
opinion of the majority, determine us to believe certain things. 
It is the line of least resistance so to do. It is difficult, unpleasant, 
sometimes dangerous, not to do so. (2) The desire to believe, "the 
will to believe," because the belief in question yields or promises 
to yield personal satisfaction ; it promotes some end, satisfies some 
desire, holds out the inducement of personal profit or social good 
(Pragmatists have made the most of this motive as the criterion 
of truth.) (3) The self -evidence of experience or inference there- 
from. I believe in the reality of my physical surroundings, because 
I see and touch things ; I believe in the multiplication table, be- 
cause I see its truth with the eye of the mind. (4) The coherence 
or harmony of the belief in question with already accepted beliefs ; 
consistency or system in believing. Epistemology, the logic of 
belief, is concerned to weigh and estimate all these motives as 
logical grounds for believing. To enter upon this subject here 

% Cf. Treatise of Human Nature, Part iii, Par. 7. 



WHAT IS THINKING? 29 

would be to anticipate the work of many of the following chapters. 4 
I proceed with the subject of the nature of judgment. 

What then is judgment? Firstly, a judgment is always the 
affirmation or denial of a relation between a subject and a predi- 
cate, a "that" and a "what." In the example "this room is cold" 
the "that" or subject is "this room," the "what" or predicate is 
"cold" ; the relation affirmed is that coldness is a quality of this 
room, that is, in some way belongs to or inheres in "this room." A 
negatively expressed judgment/ be it noted, is always expressly the 
denial that a specific relation holds between subject and predicate 
and, by implication, the affirmation that the opposite or contra- 
dictory predicate inheres in the subject; for example "this room 
is not cold" asserts, by implication, that some other quality in the 
temperature order belongs to "this room." 

Thus far all is plain sailing. No philosopher would disagree 
with the above statement. But, when we ask what are subject and 
predicate, what are the relations between them and how can they 
be related, we immediately become involved in controversy. One 
school, the objective or absolute idealists, aver that the subject of 
a judgment is always reality in some aspect, form or degree, and 
that judgment is the affirmation of a meanvng, a universal or "ideal 
content/' of reality. They aver, further, that this definition 
implies, when thought out fully, that reality, the ultimate subject 
of all judgments, is a single systematic whole or organized totality 
best described as "universal reason" (Hegel), "absolute self" 
(Koyce), or "absolute experience" (Bradley). Another school, 
the logical atomists or neo-realists, 5 aver that terms, that is, sub- 
jects and predicates, and relations have separate existence (or, in 
the case of universals and other relations, subsistence), and may be 
joined and separated like counters or marbles. Empiricists would 
agree (and where they wouldn't they should) with the objective 
idealists that the subject of judgment is always some fragment or 
aspect of reality. 

Keality is the ultimate subject of all judgment. In order to 
avoid misunderstanding, I shall mean by "reality," anything that 



Keference may be made to the excellent article by Alexander Mair in 
Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Beligion and Ethics, Vol. ii, pp. 459-464. 

5 Not all logical atomists seem to be neo-realists or vice versa. The logical 
atomists insist that logic is the essence of philosophy and they interpret logic 
formally. 



30 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

really exists, whether in the physical world or in minds ; and by a 
"truth," any judgment or set of judgments, that is, any intellectual 
apprehension, which symbolizes or represents significantly a real 
existence. In short, reality '= existence, and truth=thought 
corresponding with existence. 6 False propositions are those which 
do not correspond with existence, but have coherent meanings 
that might so correspond. Unmeaning propositions are those that 
not only do not correspond, but are positively incompatible, with 
the nature of existence or reality. For example, it is false that 
human beings can live without eating, it is unmeaning to say that 
ropes can be made of sand or capital out of debts. Such proposi- 
tions have the grammatical form of propositions and, as such, may 
be printed or uttered, but they are not logically real or valid 
propositions. 

Existence or reality clearly includes physical bodies, living 
bodies, and minds with all their thoughts, feelings, beliefs and 
impulsions. Keality also may include other things, such as 

•Being, Beality, Existence and Subsistence. 

The lack of agreement among philosophers in regard to the terms used by 
them, and the failure to define their terms, are responsible for much confusion 
and misunderstanding. I shall use the above terms as follows: 

Being includes everything within the universe of discourse — all imaginary, 
absurd, and impossible objects of discourse, such as round squares, ropes of 
sand, capital made up of debts, dead live men, virtuous rocks, vicious mathe- 
matical formulae, as well as all real objects. Since Parmenides there has been 
much puzzlement as to how non-being can be thought. Plato asked, l i How can 
one think that which is not?" and said that non-being must have being if it 
can be known. (See especially the Theaetetus and the Sophist). Hegel said 
that non-being and being are one and the same. This means, I take it, that 
neither non-being, nor being in general or in the abstract, mean anything at all. 
Non-being, or that which is not, unless specified, is utterly meaningless; and 
being, or that which is, must be always something definite. All real being is 
determinate or specific. Impossible and imaginary objects of thought have 
mental and psychical being (in minds which think them and on printed pages) 
but not real existence. In other words we can form images and ideas of non- 
existent and impossible objects; for example: an image of a man made of 
green cheese or a round square. 

Existence includes whatever really is. I shall use existence and reality as 
synonymous, and as including all sorts of determmately real beings. 

Subsistence. Truths, that is, true judgments and propositions, subsist, or 
are valid. They do not exist, for they are the relations which obtain between 
existent minds knowing and objects known, when minds correctly apprehend 
the nature of other existents, including their own existence as objects of thought 
and their relations to one another. (It will be noted that I hold that the nature 
of any determinate existent or individual is affected by and affects its relations 
to other existents. This doctrine will be argued later.) By saying that truth 
or truths subsist I imply a relational conception of truth. There would be no 
truths if there were no minds to know. 

See Leighton, "The Objects of Knowledge," in The Philosophical Beview, 
Vol. xvi (1907), pp. 577-587. 



WHAT IS THINKING? 31 

electrons and disembodied spirits, and all particular existents may 
be embraced in one all-inclusive existence or absolute reality. We 
are not now concerned with the question, what existence or reality 
includes. Every judgment, that is seriously meant, has for its 
subject some fragment or aspect of reality; and every judgment 
affirms (or denies, and thus implicitly affirms) that the fragment 
or aspect of reality which is its subject is qualified by, or in some 
way connected with, some other fragment or aspect of reality. 
Thus the thinker, in making a judgment, affirms that he has appre- 
hended the meaning of a relation between existential data or facts. 
To apprehend and comprehend facts in relation is the whole busi- 
ness of thinking as such (the psychical motives which impel to 
thinking is another question) ; and the relation,, if correctly appre- 
hended, is a constituent of the whole fact as apprehended and com- 
prehended. No one seriously and persistently thinks about rocks, 
or birds, or triangles, or the principles of logic, unless he holds that, 
in so doing, the subjects of his thinking and the relations of these 
subjects really obtain in, or validly signify some aspect of, the 
realm of existence or real being. 

Every subject of judgment is believed to exist, either as a bit 
of sense experience, of internal experience (feeling and reflection), 
or to be a valid inference or construction from experience. The 
implicit or explicit subject of judgment is always experience, 
actual and possible, either in its particular and specific qualities 
or in its universal relations, meanings and values. 

The work of thought, starting from some item of experience, 
is to reconstruct it by setting it in a larger context, to find its mean- 
ings; that is, to see it in relation to other items of experience. 
Relations or universals, as thought of, are the carriers of all the 
meanings and values of experience for the experiencing self ; and, 
as existing, are the interconnections of items of experience, by 
which their meanings and values are sustained and enhanced. 

Thinking functions in the organization and reorganization of 
experience, which is at once a process of interpretation and of 
reconstruction, through interpretation. 

The operation of thinking has two aspects or phases: (1) 
analysis or taking apart and (2) synthesis or putting together. 
The first step in thinking is judgment. Merely to have an experi- 
ence, such as to see a light or color or feel warm is not thinking. 
It is mere ideation. But if one say, "Behold, the sunlight," "That 



32 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

is red," or "I feel warm," these are judgments, and thinking has 
then begun. "Horse" is a concept, not a judgment, but "there are 
horses" is a judgment. It has been proposed to distinguish be- 
tween simple apprehension and judgment, the former being mere 
awareness of an experience. The terms are, perhaps, ill chosen, 
since to apprehend mentally is to think. The distinction is between 
simply experiencing, or being sentient (which I take to include 
having images or ideas floating in the mind when in a state of 
reverie or day dreaming), as well to have sensuous feelings, and 
thinking the experience. As soon as one thinks one employs uni- 
versals. There can be no thinking without universals. In such 
cases as "The pencil is here," "here" is a universal, a meaning. 
Analysis is the process of discrimination by which universals are 
recognized; and synthesis, the process by which universals are 
seen to be the connecting principles of things. (By "thing," in 
the present connection, I always mean a determinate item of 
experience.) A simple qualitative liheness, such as color or 
breadth, is a universal, and a likeness cannot be recognized with- 
out recognition of unlikeness. Recognition of qualitative liheness 
and unlikeness or difference; of numerical identity and diversity; 
of more and less of the same hind in number, magnitude and 
intensity; of identity and diversity in meanings and universals; of 
a regular order or causal sequence in change — such are some of the 
elementary ways in which thinking, as at once analytic and syn- 
thetic, operates in the ordering of experience. To thmh is to relate 
or order, to relate is to synthesize, but to relate is equally to have 
discriminated or analyzed. For items of experience, whether 
percepts, images or concepts, as subjects of thought, have signifi- 
cant differences only in so far as they have also significant like- 
nesses, and vice versa. We neither compare nor separate V2 and 
the flavor of champagne because, there being nothing common to 
them, there is nothing significantly different between them. 

An inference is a combination of judgments. It is the attribu- 
tion of a universal to a subject, through the mediation of another 
universal. We are not here concerned with the logical problem of 
inference, which is the problem as to how from one universal we 
have a right to pass to another ; beyond saying that there must be 
some identical quality in the universals, if the inference is to ba 
valid ; the two universals must be grounded in a wider universal. 
For example: "Roses are plants; plants are perishable; therefore, 



WHAT IS THINKING? 33 

roses are perishable"; means that perishableness is common at 
least to roses and other plants, and possibly to other things. 

The function of thought then is the interpretation of experience 
in terms of universals; and, through this interpretation, the organ- 
ization or ordering of the data of experience into a more systematic 
whole of meaning, in order to arrive at a self-coherent view of 
things, a harmonious system of meanings, which can be used and 
enjoyed by selves — one that will work in practice and be emotion- 
ally satisfying since it grows out of experience, and, being logically 
consistent with it, reveals and enhances the significance of the 
empirical order. And experience is to be understood here in the 
most liberal sense — to include the facts of sense perception, of 
moral experience, of interpersonal affection, aesthetic intuition and 
religious feeling. The interpretative and organizing function of 
thought is relevant to the understanding and coordination of all 
these types of experience into more inclusive orders. 

The chief forms or categorical ways in which thought functions 
in organizing experience are : qualitative likeness and unlikeness, 
or sameness and difference; numerical identity and diversity, 
unity and plurality; 7 intensive and extensive magnitude (greater, 
less and equal in degrees of the same quality) ; temporal sequence 
(before, after and simultaneous with) ; causal order, purposive 
order, individuality and totality. We shall not discuss here the 
metaphysical significance of these categories, 8 but it is in place to 
point out briefly how they operate in the organization of experi- 
ence. 

Likeness and unlikeness are first discerned and employed on 
the merely qualitative level, that is, before the mind has learned to 
formulate and employ, in the field of perception, quantitative units 
and measurements. The primary elements of knowledge are 
things, that is, complexes of sensory qualities. Like things are 
complexes of qualities in which the significant or important like- 
nesses in qualities seem to overbalance the differences. Of course 
whether things are classified as like or unlike, the same or different 

T The two latter pairs are built up by a clearer thought-development out of 
the primitive and vague recognition of likeness and unlikeness; a thing is 
identical with, because wholly like, itself; things are different because the 
unlikenesses exceed the likenesses or at least prevent the recognition of same- 
ness; a unit is a thing that is wholly self -identical ; a plurality is a collection 
or series of units. 

8 See Book ii. 



34 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

in kind, is a matter of degree and relative to the interests and 
purposes of the classifiers. If a herdsman is counting up all his 
live stock, pigs, goats, sheep, cattle and horses are alike in that they 
are all live stock ; if he is trading goats for horses, goats and horses 
are different. The recognition of degrees of intensity and magni- 
tude, in the same quality or in similar things, is the next step, and 
it marks the beginning of measurement through number, spatial 
extent and weight; one horse is swifter than another, one pig is 
bigger and contains more pork than another. Thus there arises 
the notion of a unit of quality, which is contained in a given thing 
or collection of things a specific number of times; for example, 
coldnesses and warmths, brightnesses, lengths, breadths, thick- 
nesses, weights, rates of movement. Measurement is, in all cases, 
dependent upon the recognition of a unit of quality; even in the 
measurement of merely extensive magnitude, for instance the 
dimensions of a lumber pile, it is the containing of a qualitative 
unit, that is a unit of spatial extent that is in question. The con- 
cept of number is the simplest and clearest illustration of the way 
in which the mind builds up, from its vague primitive notions of 
individuality, likeness and unlikeness, relation and order, a sys- 
tematic scheme of thought. The original of the notion of arith- 
metical unity is undoubtedly the empirical intuition of individuals 
or particulars with determinate characters. Counting begins with 
things that, for practical purposes, are units ; the individual man 
and his digits; other human individuals, animals, and other 
natural objects. These are classified by important resemblances 
into classes and groups, and then indexed or systematized, A class 
is a repetition of like units. A group is a system or order of units, 
regarded as interrelated and thus constituting a whole. It is a 
one-in-many or many-in-one. The fact that we can only count 
individuals, classify them, and arrange them into groups, by a 
process involving a temporal sequence gives rise to the notion of 
order. 

A collection or a group of simultaneously existing things, 
whether concrete things or the properties of space, is a reversible 
order, whereas a causal sequence is an irreversible order. And 
the principle of continuity is primarily that of temporal persistency 
of likeness and identity through difference and diversity ; that is, 
of continuity of existence through succeeding moments of time and 
in differing portions of space. The recognition of spatial continu- 



WHAT IS THINKING? 35 

ity is dependent on the recognition of temporal continuity. At 
first there is no distinction made in human thinking between 
mechanical and purposive order. When once this distinction 
arises, mechanical order becomes the clear case of reversible series 
and purposive order that of irreversible series of events. 9 

The mind abstracts from the empirical qualitative notions of 
individuality, classes, and groups the notions of unity, repetition, 
class relation, group relation, order, whole part-order, as formal 
concepts applicable to all sorts of natural entities or contents. 
Thus numerical relations become the parent types of abstract, that 
is, contentless categories of unity, plurality, class relation, order, 
whole and part. Thus the analytic-synthetic activity of thought 
gives rise to the notions of pure discreteness, natural numbers, and 
unification of the discrete assemblages or groups of numbers. 

Thus, in the manner sketched above, there arise, through the 
activity of thought, the primary universale, or categories of think- 
ing, by which all experience is organized. The same motives and 
methods of thought are at work in the herdsman counting and 
manipulating his live stock as in the philosopher trying to conceive 
and arrange in a systematic or orderly scheme the whole of em- 
pirical existence. The chief differences are the more universal 
sweep of the philosopher's interest and outlook and the deeper 
penetration of his analysis. 

The primary universale, such as the fundamental categories 
and the principles of logic, are timelessly valid meanings which get 
temporal application in concrete intuitional shape in actual human 
knowledge; but which cannot be themselves products of mere 
human thinking. These timelessly valid meanings must be the 
structural constituents of the universe in so far as it is rational, 
elements in the systematic intelligibility or universal reason which 
is implied in the coherence of the world order. There are two 
kinds of universals, the primary universals or fundamental cate- 
gories which are the most fundamental predicates of empirical 
reality. Examples of these are likeness, unlikeness, identity, 
diversity, systematic unity (identity in difference or individuality 
of which selfhood and thinghood are special forms) ; continuity in 
change (of which substance and uniformity are special forms) ; 
causality (which involves continuity and novelty) ; end and sys- 

9 For full discussion of the categorical types above enumerated se« Book ii, 
Chaps. 10-17. 



36 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

tematic totality or wholeness and order (the full meaning of 
unity). Secondary universals are general empirical predicates, 
intuited by us in interpreting the structure of special classes of 
reality or particular fact. They always involve an empirical ele- 
ment of sense perception or feeling, and are thus conditioned in 
their scope and meaning by particular fact. Examples of these are 
whiteness, loudness, bitterness, painfulness, happiness, love. In 
short, the secondary universals involve both particular experiences 
and the reaction of the thinker thereto. They arise from the inter- 
preting activity of thought, and thus presuppose the unconscious 
operation of the primary categories. The question as to whether 
we immediately apprehend these universals seems to me a purely 
psychological one and unimportant for logic and metaphysics. My 
own view is that we do immediately apprehend them. 

Empirical universals occupy a middle ground between sensory 
particulars and the primary categories. Thus we find an ascending 
scale of universality or comprehensiveness in knowledge from par- 
ticular fact up the most universal and nonempirical principles 
employed in the organization of experience. Sensory particulars 
are truths of fact, and nonempirical universals are truths of reason. 
This distinction, however, cannot be ultimate. It represents our 
inability to organize completely the particulars of experience into 
an articulated whole or reflective intuition of meaning. Truth of 
bare fact and truth of reason represent respectively the beginnings 
and the ideal completion of the intuition of reality as a perfected 
system of meanings — the two ends of our knowing separated and 
connected by a middle region in which our thought works in its 
endeavor progressively to grasp reality as a living totality. 

The primary universals, which constitute the meanings and 
grounds of all cognized relations between particulars, and which, 
hence, are the conditions of the grouping of objects into classes, of 
their organization into systematic totalities, of the correlation of 
events into causal orders or series, are not necessarily expressions 
of existential or ontological identity of the things related. If one 
say "the same causes are at work here and now as there and then," 
that does not mean numerical identity, but only similarity or like- 
ness. The world consists of objects of knowledge that can be 
arranged in a great variety of classes, types, groups or orders, 
because of the great variety of qualitative and dynamic similarities 
which coexist or occur in successive moments of time. (Note 



WHAT IS THINKING? 37 

Royce's discussion in Ruge's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical 
Sciences, Vol. I, "Logic") For instance, a causal law is a case 
of one kind of event being the sine qua non of another kind of 
event. 

The fundamental postulate of thought is that the elements of 
the world are interrelated parts of one whole or system (universe). 
This postulate does not imply that these elements are really iden- 
tical in stuff or nature. It implies only that the elements are, in 
various significant fashions, relevant to each other ; that there are 
many kinds or types of similarities of quality, quantity, group or 
serial order or relational sequence or appreciable value between 
them. Reality may ultimately consist of many dynamic types of 
being, existing and operating in manifold types of relationships 
rather than one being with many differentiations internal to it. 
(If there be only one real being, there is no sense in speaking of 
it as one in kind. Kind implies at least two examples.) 

I have said that thought aims to group its objects in a sys- 
tematic or ordered totality of relationships. It sets before itself 
the task of conceiving the world of knowables in a spatial whole or 
system of reciprocally related elements, and in a temporal whole 
or continuity of dependent sequences. Its goal would be absolutely 
achieved if, at any moment, all the not-further-analyzable, and 
qualitatively unique, and numerically distinct elements of reality 
were grouped as a system of reciprocally dependent factors; and 
if the successive temporal phases of the systematic whole could be 
seen to imply one another as a completed series seen in a supra- 
temporal system of relationships, totus, teres atque rotundus. This 
ideal is what Spinoza means by his knowledge sub specie ceter- 
nitatis (seeing all things under the form of eternity), Hegel by 
"the absolute idea," Bradley and Bosanquet by "the principle of 
ground" as the logical nerve or principle of totality of the real, 
Royce by his "all-knower." In such a perfect insight all empirical 
plurality and all temporal sequences would be transformed into a 
system of nontemporal relationships. Bosanquet says that when 
causation is thought out, the notion of time vanishes and the 
principle of causation becomes the principle of ground. Thus, the 
logical ideal of coherence or systematic totality is converted into a 
metaphysical criterion of ultimate reality, and the temporal 
actuality of human experience is viewed as absorbed into a time- 
less or eternal totality of being. 



38 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

I admit that all real entities or individuals, and all relation- 
ships which they sustain, must now, or at any other given moment 
of time, be internal to the totality of the real. 10 To say this is to 
say nothing more than that, in knowing, we are dealing with our 
data as parts of the universal order. But this admission settles 
nothing as to the relative degrees of independence and self- 
determination to be accorded to the individual members of the 
total reality. It settles nothing whatever as to the specific char- 
acters and degrees of the interrelationships of any two or more 
entities. To grasp the ground of the being of any thing, or of the 
occurrence of any event, is to gain an insight into the objective 
system of relationships or determinate orders in which things and 
events live and move and have their being. The moving spring 
of every effort towards the unification of knowledge is the faith 
that the world is a systematic and intelligible totality; that it is, 
in some considerable degree, one orderly whole, whose successive 
phases are at least partially continuous. 

But to say this settles nothing as to the precise degree and 
manner in which the being of any real entity has its ground 
respectively in itself and outside itself, or as to the degree in which 
the successive phases of the actual behavior and qualities of any- 
thing real could be determined now if one had a complete insight 
into the totality of relationships in which real entities at present 
stand to one another and as to the degree in which successive phases 
of reality are discontinuous or continuous. 

If time and change disappear from an interpretation of 
reality just in the measure in which that interpretation nears com- 
pletion; if, for example, time has no place in complete causal 
explanation, then both mechanical-causal explanation and teleo- 
logical interpretation of the world process or any bit thereof vanish 
or become meaningless and unreal when they reach their fruitions. 
In brief, if the logical ideal of knowledge is taken to involve the 
absolute monistic and eternalistic conception of reality as a time- 
less whole or system, of which the finite temporal individual ele- 
ments are illusory and transitory differentiations, then the realm 
of experience, from which we set out, in which alone we live and 
act and have our being, and the logical activity of thought itself 
are illusory guides which lure us to intellectual self-annihilation 

10 On relations see further Book ii, Chap. 12. 



WHAT IS THINKING? 39 

Knowledge means at once the comprehension of the mutual 
relevancies or orderly interdependences of the many distinct 
existences, which make up reality, and of the uniqueness of the 
being of each existence. It means, at once, the interpretation of 
the successive phases of the actual as orderly series or continuous 
sequences, and the recognition of the uniqueness of each successive 
phase in the life of the universe or of any part thereof. 



APPENDIX 

existence and subsistence 

Philosophy and Gegenstandstheorie 

In a series of influential works, the late Professor A. von Meinong 
developed what he regarded as a hitherto unworked field in Philos- 
ophy — Gegenstandstheorie, Theory of Objects; "Object" being used 
in the sense of any object of thought, 11 anything that can be mentally 
apprehended or intended, including actual and ideal objects, possible 
and impossible things. Actual things, such as chairs and tables; 
ideal entities, such as geometrical and numerical truths; imaginary 
things, such as centaurs and hippogriffs ; impossible and contradictory 
entities, such as round squares, sand ropes — are all Gegenstande. All 
possible Gegenstande subsist (bestehen) ; one class of them exists, 
namely, empirical things. Existents me temporal, they persist in 
time. Pure subsistents, such as mathematical principles, are timeless. 
Causal relations are not relevant to pure subsistents. There is a 
mixed class in which the basis of the subsistent entity is empirical, 
and therefore temporal, existence, whereas the subsistent principle of 
itself is timeless; for example, if we say that a certain man resembles 
another man who has died, the men are temporal existents; whereas 
the resemblance is a timeless truth. Eesemblance and difference are 
timeless entities. To say that the difference between red and green 
exists at a certain time has scarcely more meaning than to call a 
musical tone white or black. The meaning of a judgment (or of a 
supposal, Annahme, as in the case of guesses, surmises, fancies) is 

"The most important of these writings are: Ueber Gegenstande hoherer 
Ordnung,^ Zeitschrift fur Psychologie, Vol. xxi, 1896; Ueber Gegenstands- 
theorie, in Vntersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie, 1914. 
Ueber Annahmen, 2d Edition, 1910 ; and Ueber der Stellung der Gegenstands- 
theorie im System der Wissenschaften, 1907; also in the Zeitschrift fur 
Philosophic 



40 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

its "objective." "Supposals" are not mere ideas or images, since a 
supposal always involves a tentative yes or no; as in the case of a 
guess, a presumption, a surmise. Meinong's discussions of supposdls 
are a valuable contribution to the psychology of imagination, and 
meaning, and therefore to logic. The objective is the meaning-con- 
tent (Bedeutungsinhalt) of the act of judgment or supposal, whereas 
an object (Objekt not Gegenstand), for Meinong, is always an actual 
reality. Thus the objective in any act of thought is gegenstandliche. 
The meanings of judgments (and supposals) are their Sosein, their 
nature or "what." Thus many objectives have Sosein, but not Sein; 
they have no corresponding existents, no "thats." Meinong's dis- 
tinction between Sosein and Sein or existence seems to be the same 
as our English-speaking distinction between the "what" and the 
"that" ; his objective is simply the "what" of our philosophical dis- 
course. 12 He says that one grasps or apprehends a Gegenstand in its 
Sosein or "what"; but what one judges is either its Sein or being or 
its further Sosein in relation. Relations and complexes (which result 
from reflection upon primary objects of thought) are Gegenstande 
hoherer Ordnung — "objects" (in his technical sense) "of higher 
order." If a superior is necessarily based on an inferior it is 
"founded" (fundiert) on the latter. All objects of knowledge are 
factual (thatsdchlich) objectives or facts. The term fact is to be 
applied not only to empirical existents but to all valid propositions; 
for example, to those of mathematics. All facts are known through 
evidence, which may be either rational (a priori) or empirical (a 
posteriori). All empirical fact is temporally existent. All rational 
fact is timelessly subsistent. Whatever can exist must also subsist; 
it gains existence when it becomes temporal fact; for example, until 
recently a dirigible airship had only subsistent being; now it exists. 
Contradictory and impossible "objects" (Gegenstande) have an extra- 
existential subsistence (Aussersein) . There are objects that are not 
(Es gibt Gegenstande das nicht sind) ; for example, a round square 
or a perpetuum mobile. 

Metaphysics, as Meinong conceives its province, is the most com- 
prehensive science of empirical existence. It deals with the general 
characters and interrelationships of empirical and temporal reality. 
Gegenstandstheorie is an a priori companion to metaphysics and an 
indispensable prelude to the theory of knowledge. Meinong has made 
here important contributions to logic and theory of knowledge. But 
I do not agree with all the conclusions drawn from his analysis of 
Gegenstande. 

12 Cf. particularly, F. H. Bradley's Principles of Logic and Appearance 
and 'Reality, passim. 



WHAT IS THINKING? 41 

The doctrine that subsistent being is a wider and richer class of 
entities than existence and that the latter is a sort of temporal and 
empirical specification of the former seems to provide a realm of being 
for universals or meanings independent of any mind; it lends sup- 
port to the sort of realism which would give to "ideal objects" (Uni- 
versals and Values) a super-existential and nonmental being. Mei- 
nong himself believes in impersonal values. At this point Logical 
Kealism becomes identical with that sort of abstract or impersonal- 
istic idealism which confers on pure universals, such as the propo- 
sitions of pure logic and mathematics, the universal relationships or 
"laws" of reality, and universal values, a super-existential and timeless 
being which is imperfectly and intermittently embodied in empirical 
and temporally conditioned existents. Abstract principles are ac- 
corded a being superior to actual reality. This, of course, is the 
sort of logical realism or abstract idealism which is frequently at- 
tributed to Plato. It figures prominently, in one disguise or another, 
in NeoKantianism (for example, in the Marburger School) and even 
in the value-philosophy of the Baden school (Windelband and others) . 
Indeed, the step is short from the doctrine that universals and values 
have an eternally subsistent being to a consciousness in general or a 
transcendent Ought as the ultimate reality. 

The doctrine that subsistence is some sort of transcendental non- 
mental and nonphysical being is based on a misuse of language. It 
seems to me to rest on the same fallacy as the Ontological Argument. 
Existence is not a predicate to be added to the "what" of any real sub- 
ject. Subsistence is not a kind of superior and timeless being. 13 
There can be no timeless being, except in the sense of endless per- 
sistence or endless duration. Even a real God could be timeless only 
in the latter sense. Contradictory or impossible objects of thought, 
and even imaginary objects of thought, really exist only as images or 
symbols in the mind of some individual and in the linguistic or sym- 
bolic expressions of that mind. A round square or a rope of sand 
are simply unmeaning conjunctions of linguistic symbols — unmean- 
ing because they are combinations of contradictory concepts. A cen- 
taur is a conjunction of images, which conjunction is not factually 
impossible but is empirically unverifiable. A perpetuum motile is a 



15 In patristic theology and mediaeval philosophy subsistence does not mean 
super- or extra-existential being. It means real, persistent essential being or 
existence, in contrast with nonexistence and contingent existence. In the older 
English writers it is used in the same general sense ; Baxter, for instance, says 
that the three great attributes of God — omnipotence, understanding and will — 
those attributes by which he is God, are by some called subsistential. "Sub- 
sistential Being" is the equivalent of ll Essential Being.' ' The same general 
usage will be found in Sir Thos. Browne, Milton and Cudworth. 



42 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

vague expression for something incompatible with the empirical con- 
ditions of movement. It cannot even be meant or thought through. 
Such things have not even pure logical subsistence. If they had they 
might be brought into existence. In the last analysis all meanings, 
universals, laws, and values are derived by mental activity, through 
the process of abstractive construction, from empirical existence. Ex- 
istence is prior and superior to subsistence. Nothing is logically possi- 
ble, nothing has meaning, that is incompatible with actual existence. 
Even the principles of logic and mathematics are but symbolic ex- 
pressions for the most general ways in which minds behave. If all 
minds were blotted out of existence there would be no logic or mathe- 
matics to subsist. The same is true even more obviously of physical 
science. The laws of physics do not subsist above nature and they 
do not, as such, exist in nature. Nature has a certain texture, certain 
observable characteristics (qualities or ways of behaving). Our sci- 
entific laws are symbols invented by minds for the description of 
these general ways of behaving. Science, indeed all truth, subsists 
only in and for thinking minds. Its validity depends, in the last 
resort, on the degree of vital correspondence that is possible between 
minds and the "nature" of nature as revealed through sense ex- 
perience. 

Above all things, to talk of values or appreciations as having any 
sort of being without valuators or appreciators seems to me sheer 
nonsense. If values are not mere figments engendered by human 
desire and imagination there must be a vital correspondence between 
the fundamental interests of human beings and physical nature. In 
short, laws, meanings, values, have no being apart from the feelings 
and activities of selves or persons in dynamic interplay with Nature. 
In so far as they may be valid or effective, laws and values are the 
mental counterparts of the ways in which nature behaves in response 
to the demands of human personality. 

I have felt it necessary at this point to anticipate, in sketchy 
form, a main theme of this work, since it is raised in all its aspects 
by the much-touted distinction between subsistence and existence, f 
with which many so-called realists, as well as idealists who find 
refuge in a vicious abstractionism, try to save science and human 
values while letting the troublesome and perplexing problem of per- 
sonality go hang. This is throwing out the baby with the bath. 
Let us not be imposed upon by that vice to which philosophers and 
scientists are peculiarly tempted although no one is immune from it — 
the vice of setting up abstractions and symbols in the place of con 
crete realities. The only business of systematic philosophy or meta- 
physics is to try to understand as fully as possible the world as it is. 



WHAT IS THINKING? 43 

The world is no "appearance" or illusion; we are appearances of and 
in it, although I hope not illusions; our concepts, laws, universals, 
even our so-called universal values, are but appearances engendered 
by our minds in interaction with the rest of the cosmos. One ordi- 
nary human self is worth more, as a reality, than all the ineffable 
values ever conceived by the minds of philosophers. In this respect 
a healthy common sense is right. The naive realist is right when he 
stubbornly believes, in spite of sophisticated argumentation, that what 
he perceives and feels are good realities. Any other starting point 
plays into the hands of that sickly illusionism which, in Hindu specu- 
lation par excellence, has been the product of auto-hypnotic dream- 
ing, of fleeing from the actual instead of wrestling with it in thought 
and action. 

Reality includes: (1) The particular empirical existents in time 
and space. (2) The temporal, spatial, dynamic, vital and whatever 
other relations there are which constitute the interplay of particulars 
as elements in the cosmos. Unreality includes everything that has 
no corresponding fact in the natures or relations of the existing par- 
ticulars. It includes impossible, contradictory and unmeaning 
images, concepts and propositions, which are so because incompatible 
with the actual. Between the actual real and the unreal is the realm 
of the possible — of ideas of entities which are not incompatible with 
the actual order, but for which no corresponding existents have yet 
been found. "The possible is really possible" — this means its exist- 
ence is not excluded by the actual. 

Hans Driesch, in his Ordnungslehre, distinguishes between the 
doctrine of order and metaphysics. The doctrine of order is a sys- 
tematic doctrine of the categories. It deals with the forms of ideal 
objects of thought (logic and mathematics) as well as with the forms 
of interpretation of existential objects; whereas metaphysics is con- 
cerned with the relation of knowledge and existence. Thus Ord- 
nungslehre is very similar in aim to Gegenstandstheorie and to 
Phenomenology as Husserl conceives it. Driesch has since published 
a Metaphysics, Wwhlichheitslehre, which I have not seen. 14 

14 1 have not aimed above, either to expound Meinong 's views adequately or 
to criticise them in detail. I have taken them as a starting point for discussing 




expounded and discussed Meinong 
in three articles in Mind, N. S., Vol. xiii, pp. 204 ff., 336 ff., and 509 ff., 
entitled ' ' Meinong '& Theory of Complexes and Assumptions. ' ' As this volume 
goes to press I note the first installment of an article on "The Philosophical 
Eesearches of Meinong" by G. Dawes Hicks, in Mind (N. S.) Vol. xxxi, No. 1, 
January, 1922, pp. 1-30. 



CHAPTER III 



PERCEPTS AND CONCEPTS 



Certain thinkers, notably, William James and H. Bergson, who 
insist on the validity of immediate perceptual experience as being 
the primary datum for philosophy, argue that in the conceptualiz- 
ing process the mind is carried, not deeper into, but farther away 
from, reality. Percepts are characterized as concrete and dynamic, 
continuous with the original and ever varying flow of living 
reality; whereas concepts are static, abstract, pale shadows or 
skeletons which misrepresent the rich flux of experience, which is 
the real stuff of things. 

I regard this opposition of perception and conception as erron- 
eous. Certainly, all knowledge arises from the determinate data 
of experience. Certainly too, all our valid concepts, our most high- 
flown theories, must dip back into and be continuous with living 
experience. But there is no part of experience, however simple 
and dumb it may seem, that does not involve in some degree the 
organizing and interpreting activity of thought. The crude per- 
ception of a physical thing is an act of synthesis of sense quali- 
ties into a recognizable unity. In perceiving a stone, the self 
recognizes the existence of a unified complex of sense qualities. 
It could not recognize the thinghood of the stone if it could not be 
conscious of the unity of its own act in identifying the stone. It 
cannot be conscious of its own unity without, at the same time, 
recognizing the existence of other units — things and selves. The 
self places the stone somewhere in space. This implies the con- 
sciousness of relating the self's experience in an order of things in 
space. The self recognizes the existence of the stone now and then. 
This implies the consciousness of the self and other entities, as 
existing through a temporal succession, and of time as the order 
in which events occur and exist. The causal relation arises from 
recognition of the influences which the self suffers and exerts in 
a world of orderly events in time. The categories, in terms oi 

44 



PERCEPTS AND CONCEPTS 45 

which man classifies and organizes the elements of his experiences, 
are engendered by the interplay of his conceptualizing intelligence 
with the world of sense data. The materials of sense perception 
submit to the organizing activity of thought. Through the organ- 
ization of the empirical facts the world becomes more articulate 
and significant, becomes, in short, a cosmos ; and the self in turn 
becomes more fully conscious of its own intelligent nature. The 
basic processes of human intelligence must be akin to the structure 
of a world thus apprehended, in all its variegated and colorful 
data, by the activity of thought. Nature, the experienced world 
order, is an orderly whole. The subject becomes a consciously 
rational self through its work of organizing, interpreting, evalu- 
ating and controlling, the natural order. In finding order or law 
and in achieving values in the world, the self is holding intercourse 
with the order of reality. No impassable gulf can be admitted to 
yawn between experience and thought, perception and conception. 
Our concepts work pragmatically. They are significant, because 
the intelligence which shapes them is organic to the world and the 
world is harmonious with intelligence. 

Genuine concepts are not pale and colorless abstracts of prop- 
erties common to the objects which concepts at once denote and 
connote. A concept is not a generic image, although a generic 
image, a composite photograph may furnish the imaginal setting 
of a concept. The true concept is a principle of order , a law of a 
series, a relating function. The term which expresses the concept 
is simply the symbol of the principle of order which is exemplified 
in a series of differentiations or particular embodiments of iden- 
tical qualities. The true concept of man or justice, for example, is 
a functional meaning which signifies an order-series by which 
individual entities are members of a group or orderly system. 
These concepts do not "mean" that there is a finite number of 
personal qualities in men or of acts called "just," which are 
included under or ruled by the class concept "man" or "justice." 
The concept of man is the function or principle of order which is 
expressed differentially in a serial succession of particular indi- 
viduals. The concept of justice expresses the rule or law for the 
continuous production and recognition of a series of typical acts, 
each act unique but with a qualification identical with every other 
act of the same character. Thus genuine concepts are the forms 
or types of order which express, in mental symbols, the principles 



46 MAN AND THE COSMOS 



. 



of the behavior and production of ordered series of particulars 
They are laws of series. 

Each concept is an individualized law or type for the arrange- 
ment, in a series, of an indefinite succession of particulars. If I 
have an adequate concept of man or justice, I am thus able, out 
of the mass of my experiences, to group and order as they appear ; 
or, in the case of concepts of action such as justice, to produce 
the new and unique particulars of which these concepts are the 
types. The concept then of any type of being symbolizes the law 
of behavior of the individual being as member of an order-series 
or type. The states of any being of that type function in the 
specific typical relations. The biological concept of man expresses 
the laws of behavior of the human species as a member of the 
ordered series of animal forms. The psychological concept of man 
expresses the laws of his behavior as member of the ordered series 
of sentient types of life. The ethical and social concept of man 
expresses the laws of his behavior as member of well-ordered groups, 
namely the social groups. The complete concept of man would 
express all the laws of his behavior, all the ways in which human 
beings function in the totality of relations in which they live. We 
cannot exhaust the individual's existence in terms of his conceptual 
relations ; hence there remain facts in our acquaintance with indi- 
viduals which we know immediately by experience or direct 
acquaintance, and through which we appreciate the individual 
directly as this concretion-point of relations. Our inability to 
form a perfect concept of an individual is due to the complexity 
of the relations in which individuals live and act, and not to any 
irreconcilable opposition between immediate experience and 
thought. It is possible that a perfect intelligence would possess a 
complete concept, or law of behavior, for every individual. The 
true function of concepts is to symbolize dynamic relations of the 
determinate elements of reality. The genuine concepts are 
transcriptions into mental symbols of the ordered or serial char- 
acter of a world which has a relational structure. Plato's Ideas, 
in their relations to the particulars of sense, were probably in- 
tended as ordering concepts in the meaning I have given to the 
term. Whether he regarded them as eternally existing and 
transcendent types of order, I cannot discuss here. 

Since they are functions of order or laws of a series, concepts 
are dynamic. It is true, that having acquired, by our own activity, 



PERCEPTS AND CONCEPTS 47 

or by inheritance from tradition, certain concepts, we may stop 
thinking and regard these products of arrested intellectual activity 
as absolute and perfect types. Thus, by failing to carry on the 
work of thought, our apparatus of concepts may come to fall far 
short of the living realities whose nature they should express. 
But this defect of our actual conceptual furniture is not due to 
any inherent defect in conceptual thinking, but to the arrest 
thereof, to our failure to reorganize our symbols and our meanings 
and bring them into harmony with the further findings of experi- 
ence and with other concepts that arise therefrom. In fact it is 
the ordinary naive percepts, which consist so largely of traditional 
images and concepts, the products of arrested and ossified thinking, 
that are static and inadequate to the flow of experience. The 
clodhopper does not perceive what the scientist, the scholar, or the 
philosopher perceives, just because what he thinks he perceives is 
so largely made up of traditional images and concepts. He per- 
ceives what he thinks he perceives because he does not think. For 
him physical things are simply inert masses. Fossils are but 
curious bits of rock that tell no stories. The earth stands still, the 
sun revolves around it. Miracles happen, events shoot forth 
mysteriously and without adequate causes. Charms and the evil 
eye work; magic stalks abroad. The dead appear to the living. 
Organs are repaired and bones are mended by faith. Soothsaying 
is a valid form of knowledge. Almost anything may happen, and 
all because he implicitly takes as veridical sense perception, a 
topsy-turvy dom of primitive tradition, of imagery and belief which 
chimes in with his own uncriticized desires, hopes and fears. He 
does his perceiving with a primitive conceptual outfit. On the 
other hand, it is the persistent conceptual activity of thought 
which discovers order, continuity and movement, beneath the 
apparent disorder, discontinuity and inertia of those crude per- 
ceptual experiences which are really made up largely of prehistoric 
concepts. It is through conceptual thinking alone that we find in 
nature a regular causal succession, continuous evolution, ceaseless 
movement beneath the apparently placid surface of things; in 
short, in place of chaos, cosmos, an orderly world of elements in 
dynamic relations. It is not conceptual thinking, in its fresh 
analysis and synthesis of experiences, which dismembers the rich 
and concrete flux of living reality, which turns the green and 
golden tree of life into gray dead theory. This devastation is 



48 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

wrought by unthinking perception masquerading in the outworn 
garments of primitive imagery and concepts. 

James says, 1 a Out of this aboriginal sensible muchness atten- 
tion carves out objects, which conception then names and identifies 
forever — " . . . "Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights/ 'sum- 
mers' and 'winters.' We say what each part of the sense continuum 
is and all these abstracted whats are concepts." But "time" is 
surely a much more abstract concept than "day" or "night," 
"day" more abstract than the "present" moment. I can form a 
much more accurate concept of what the present moment means 
than I can of what time means. I can form a concept of "here," 
"now," "individuals" such as myself, "President of the United 
States," "King of England," the sun, Mercury, Venus, this solar 
system. Indeed all historical sciences, whether it be human his- 
tory, historical biology, geology, or astronomy, operate with con- 
cepts of individuals. Each individual has its unique character 
and place in space and time, but that does not hinder its being 
conceived in all sorts of relations of qualities, action, passion, co- 
existence and succession, with other individuals. Our most com- 
prehensive concepts or categories are formed by putting together 
more concrete concepts. It is from "now" and "then," "day" 
and "night," "summer" and "winter," that we can form the con- 
cept of time. So with space, cause, identity, truth, justice, beauty, 
value, relation. These metaphysical concepts or categories sym- 
bolize identities of character and behavior which constitute con- 
crete individuals members of ordered series. 

The consideration of the relation between perception and con- 
ception has brought us into the heart of the problem of the indi- 
vidual and the universal. Those who argue that thought murders 
reality regard the individual as given in perception and the uni- 
versal as an abstraction formed by thought from the perceptual 
reality. We shall consider fully the relation of the individual and 
the universal in a later chapter. 2 I may say here, by anticipation, 
that the truest, richest, realest individual is the one which implies 
or concretes the most universals. The individual is the concretion 
of universals. Universals are the relations of individuals. 

1 Problems of Philosophy, p. 50. 
3 Ohap. 14. 



CHAPTER IV 



THE CRITERIA OF KNOWLEDGE 



When one asks "What is truth ?" one must beware of confusing 
two different questions. These are: (1) What are the subjective 
or psychological marks of truth, how does truth "feel" to the indi- 
vidual knower? (2) What are the objective logical criteria or 
universal standards for determining the truth of propositions? 
Propositions or judgments have two aspects: (1) They are made 
or accepted and believed by individuals and thus are mental acts 
or attitudes; (2) they are, if true, objective and universal — their 
meanings agree with the universal conditions of truth and the 
specific character of reality. For example, when the pragmatist 
says that "satisfaction" or "satisfactory consequences" is the mark 
of true propositions, he is stating only a subjective or psychological 
mark of propositions, as believed or held to be true by individuals. 

Judgments are beliefs, and the belief attitude involves feeling 
or sentiment. Hence Hume says that belief belongs more properly 
to the sensitive than to the rational part of our nature and Pascal 
that the heart has reasons which the intellect knows not of. If all 
beliefs had their motives for being held wholly in feeling there 
would be no objective content of truth. All science and philosophy 
would be reduced to the subjectivity of the individual "feeler." 
But, in fact, while many beliefs, such as, for example, a person's 
belief in himself or in his sweetheart or friend, may be based 
chiefly on feeling, there are beliefs which are held because of 
empirical evidence or logical deduction from such evidence. 
These are rational beliefs, based on intellectual judgments. 

Here we are concerned with the problem of the objective or 
logical criteria of truth, and we shall now examine the principal 
theories on this subject. These are: (1) the "copy" or reprer 
sentative theory; (2) the intuitional or immediatist theory; (3) 
the coherence theory; and (4) the pragmatic theory. The "copy" 
or "representative" theory is sometimes called the agreement or 



50 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

correspondence theory — mistakenly, I think, since "agreement" 
is too vague and all-inclusive a term to designate a specific theory 
of truth. We would all agree that our beliefs, to be true, must be 
in agreement with reality ; the crucial question is — how this agree- 
ment is to be achieved and known. In the copy theory agreement 
means that our images, ideas and judgments are true when they 
are good copies or representations of reality, just as a portrait of 
an absent friend is a good one if it copies his appearance. This 
theory has its origin in the fact that the mind, through memory, 
forms images of things experienced in the past; and, through 
creative imagination and thought, forms images and conceptual 
symbols of things not experienced, by the rearrangement of repro- 
duced imaginal and conceptual elements ; and the images and con- 
ceptual symbols are found to be good or valid representatives, if 
they lead to actual experiences that agree with the pointings or 
meanings of their imaginal or symbolic representations. Ob- 
viously, a great many of our ideas, regarded as meanings, are not 
copies or reproductions of empirical things. Scientific and tech- 
nical formulae and laws, moral and political concepts and prin- 
ciples, mathematical concepts and relations, are not copies but 
conceptual symbols of actual and possible experiences or acts and 
processes. The mental content in such cases has no necessary 
imaginal or pictorial resemblances to that which it symbolizes. A 
very important part of valid knowledge thus consists, not of repre- 
sentations or copies, but of conventionalized signs or symbols. 

The problem of knowledge is a real problem, not an exercise 
in hair splitting. For, naively, the human mind assumes offhand 
that its images, concepts, and symbols mean, point to, lead toward, 
the real things which they stand for. But what common sense 
means by the "real things" are just the perceptual objects which 
are congeries of sense data, whose character is determined in part 
by the structure and reactions of the percipient. It is easy to see 
that images and symbols are valid if they correspond with the 
sensual data which they mean and promise; but, since the sense 
data are themselves variable, what real things do they represent ? 
How are we to determine to what extent and in what conditions 
our sense data are representations of reality ? How can the per- 
cipient transcend his private sense data ? By what criteria can he 
determine whether he has, in a given instance, transcended his 
private data ? 



THE CRITERIA OF KNOWLEDGE 51 

A fatal objection to the copy theory is this: if it means that 
every cognitive mental content, whether sensory or ideational, is a 
re-presentation of a reality external to and differing from it, then 
we have no means of knowing whether the "idea" is a fair copy of 
the reality. Images may be copies of percepts, but what are per- 
cepts copies of, if they too are ideas? If we know some things by 
direct acquaintance in perception, then all knowledge does not 
come by way of copying things in representations. If we do not 
know anything by direct acquaintance, then we have no means of 
knowing whether any of our so-called copies and symbols of things 
and relations are adequately representative of the supposed inde- 
pendent realities. Either we can know some parts of reality in 
some other way than by our ideas copying or representing them, 
or we do not know whether we can know any reality as it really is, 
or to what degree our ideas are good copies or symbols of the reality. 

The intuitionist or immediatist theory is that knowledge con- 
sists in intuiting, in having a direct perception of, reality. The 
essentials of the theory are these: I have immediate or direct 
acquaintance with external reality in my sense perceptions. I 
have immediate or direct acquaintance with internal reality, that 
is, with the processes of mind, by introspection or the inner sense. 
Just as I, know the qualities of objects through sense perception, 
so, by inner reflection, I know mental processes, their various con- 
tents, and the laws of their connections. The principles of logical 
thinking, the principles of ethical, social, aesthetic, and religious 
valuations, are known in the same way. It is sometimes objected 
to intuitionism that it excludes from the knowing activity all 
reflective analyses. This objection is invalid. The claim that one 
can know by intuition the nature of physical things and the nature 
of mind in no way precludes the possibility or necessity of reflect- 
ive analysis of one's intuitions. 1 

The weakness of intuitionism lies in its incompleteness, in 
what it fails to include, rather than in what it positively includes. 
Granted that, unless we know some things intuitively, or imme- 
diately, we cannot be sure that we know anything; granted that, if 
we are to have any valid knowledge of the external world, we must 
have immediate acquaintance with some of its real aspects or quali- 

1 Cf. N. Lossky, The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge; a well-developed argu- 
ment for intuitivism. All genuine realism in theory of knowledge must admit 
that knowledge has an intuitive basis. 



52 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

ties and relations ; and granted, too, that the logical operations of 
the mind, the basic ways of judging, must be known by intro- 
spective analysis; intuitionalism still fails to give an adequate 
theory of scientific and philosophical inquiry. The variations, 
inconsistencies and illusions in our sense perceptions raise the 
question — what is the relation of our varying and conflicting ex- 
periences and beliefs to the objective order ? A number of some- 
what variant perceptions of a thing may be regarded as aspects 
of the thing cognizable. What, then, is the relation of these 
aspects to the real thing? Scientific analysis is requisite to 
answer this question. Furthermore, we cannot rest satisfied with 
the enunciation of a series of disconnected judgments in regard to 
physical, vital, logical, mathematical, ethical, aesthetic and other 
facts and principles. We seek to organize these various series of 
facts-in-relation into a harmonious system. Thought seeks con- 
sistent or harmonious systems of mathematical, physical, vital, 
social, ethical, aesthetic judgments or propositions; and seeks, fur- 
ther, to determine how these special systems may be intercon- 
nected; as well as to determine how the mind's general norms of 
judgment are interwoven with, and give meaning and unity to, the 
world of sense experience. The coherence theory is the formula- 
tion of this impetus of thought. 

The coherence theory of truth is that the ultimate criterion of 
truth is the mutual coherence or harmonious organization of judg- 
ments into a system. Any single judgment is true only in so far 
as it enters as a harmonious element into a more completely 
articulated organism or consistent system of judgments. a The 
Ideal of Knowledge . . . is 2 a system, not of truths, but of truth." 
"The essential nature of thought is a concrete unity, a living indi 
viduality." "Truth, in its essential nature, is that systemati 
coherence which is the character of a significant whole. A "sig- 
nificant whole" is an organized individual experience, self- 
fulfilling and self-fulfilled. Its organization is the process of its 
self-fulfillment, and the concrete manifestation of its individual- 
ity." 4 The judgmental parts or single truths have no validity in 
isolation from the whole, and the whole is in and through the 

8 Joachim, The Nature of Truth, p. 72. 

*Ibid., p. 78. This is the standpoint of F. H. Bradley, B. Bosanquet, 
and, in general, of the Anglo-American objective idealists. 
*Ibid., p. 76. 



: 



THE CRITERIA OF KNOWLEDGE 53 

parts. The notions of life, organism, self-fulfilling process bring 
us nearest to a conception of that ideal whole, although they are 
all inadequate. There can be one and only one significant whole, 
one organized individual experience self-fulfilling and self-ful- 
filled. Nothing short of absolute individuality, nothing short of 
the completely whole experience can satisfy this postulate. Hence 
the truth is, from the point of view of human experience, an ideal 
which can never, in its completeness, be actual as human experi- 
ence. As to the relation of humanly "true" judgments to the ideal 
whole or organism of absolute truth, our true judgments are all 
partial, abstract or indeterminate truths. No one of them is com- 
pletely true when taken by itself. From judgments of particular 
fact, such as "this paper is smooth," to universal judgments, such 
as "2 plus 2 = 4" or "the law of gravitation is true for all bodies," 
we have an endless series of degrees of truth, degrees of approxima- 
tion to the one and complete whole of truth. One true judgment 
may be more inclusive of other truths, and therefore, more true, 
than another judgment. No judgment, in and by itself, is abso- 
lutely true. The degree of truth possessed by any judgment is 
measured by its systematic inclusiveness of other subordinate 
judgments. A judgment is most true when it is most determinate, 
when its background is most vitally articulated as a system of 
judgments, into which the judgment in question fits in as a deter- 
mining and determined member. 5 In the articulate systems of 
geometry and number, in the physical doctrine of energy, in a 
system of astronomical principles or geological principles, in the 
concrete interpretation of social-historical life by a Dante or a 
Goethe, or of the Renaissance by a great historian, we have a fair 
sample of the truest, because most systematic and determinate, 
types of judgments. 6 

The coherence theory of truth embodies the ideal goal of 
science and philosophy. If there be any absolutely normative ideal 
of truth this is it. But it is not the only criterion of truth, and 
often it is, in practice, useless. A carping critic might say that, if 
no truth is wholly true, then the judgment that truth is coherence 
is not wholly true. But the advocate of the coherence theory 

6 Hid., p. 113. 

• The most persuasive expositions of this doctrine are in Bbsanquet 's Logic, 
especially Vol. II, Chaps. 9 and 10, and The Principle of Individuality and 
Value, passim. 



54 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

might reply that no justification can be asked for a criterion of 
truth except that it states what the characteristics are, that, in 
varying degrees, actually are manifested in truth. A more serious 
objection to the coherence criterion is that, since we do not and 
cannot know the absolute totality or organism of truth, since we 
cannot possess the one whole and perfect individual system of 
experience, we cannot use this criterion to determine the degree of 
truth possessed by our various judgments and partial systems of 
judgment. We cannot even determine by it the relative validity 
of various truths in different partial or finite systems, each of 
which may be coherent with other judgments within its own par- 
ticular system. I am now immediately certain that I (whatever 
"I" may be) am writing in my study. I am certain, in the same 
manner, of the general character of my immediate physical sur- 
roundings. I am also certain of the truth of some propositions in 
mathematics ; certain too, of a few values in human relationships, 
literature and art; and I regard some historical facts as highly 
credible. But I have not the least inkling, perhaps, as to how 
these various types of judgment systems, enter, as factors, into the 
absolute whole of truth. I may and do hope and believe that, 
somehow, all true judgments concerning reality must cohere into 
one whole or individual system ; since, otherwise, reality cannot be 
a perfectly intelligible order, and hence not a cosmos, a universe 
at all. But, since I do not and cannot know this one coherent 
whole, in its concrete individuality, I do not know, either that the 
ideal of truth is fully honored by reality, or what particular place 
any specific finite judgments, or systems of judgments, may occupy 
in the perfect whole. Thus the coherence theory, while it expresses 
an ideal that guides thought and that, so far as it is applicable, is 
absolute, cannot be the only working criterion of truth. On the 
other hand, obedience to the ideal of coherence, freedom from con- 
tradiction in a systematic whole, or harmonious totality, is the most 
imperious and inescapable principle that controls thought. 

A third objection to the coherence theory is that thought might 
build up ideally or formally coherent systems of judgments, in 
which each member of the system might fit beautifully into the 
articulated whole, while the whole structure was out of touch with 
reality or, at best, might be a beautiful system of bare possibilities. 
In transcendental geometries, in ultraromantic theories of life, 
in the religious illusions of demented persons, and in speculations 



THE CRITERIA OF KNOWLEDGE 55 

in regard to the life after death, we find such systems. The reply 
to this criticism is that the ideal is not one of formal consistency 
of propositions concerning reality in the abstract, but of coherence, 
organic wholeness, or harmonious individuality, in experience 
regarded as a socially valid system. In short, the coherence theory 
means that our judgments must symbolize or be harmonious with 
all aspects of reality. Coherence with empirical fact must be our 
starting point, and membership in society is a stubborn fact. 
Therefore, the coherence theory must presuppose that experience 
is in touch with reality. It cannot blow hot and cold. It cannot 
start with the faith in the trustworthiness of immediate experience 
and then, by a dialectic use of its criterion, undermine the validity 
of immediate experience. 7 If it does this it defeats itself. The 
objects of belief in judgments are, in the last analysis, not proposi- 
tions about reality but reality itself. There is a duality in knowl- 
edge. A true judgment or belief is the presence in a mind of a 
meaning symbolized, a conscious intent signified, that refers, in 
right relations, to a reality other than itself; and which, as object 
of belief, is existentially distinct from the judgment itself. True 
propositions are always mental but their objects need not be 
mental. Hence, even an absolute whole of truth must be a coherent 
system of judgments or meanings which constitute a consciousness 
or awareness in which these judgments function. Truth then must 
be immanent m reality. There must be a dynamic commerce 
between the knower and the objects of knowledge. Both must be 
reciprocally functioning factors in one world. 

Pragmatism, or instrumentalism, criticises the coherence 
theory as useless in application, and professes, for its own part, 
to offer a clear working conception of the dynamic commerce be- 
tween ideas and realities, by virtue of which ideas become true, o"* 
the reverse. The pragmatist or instrumentalist insists that ideas 
are immanent agents, dynamic instruments, in the making and 
remaking of experience. The function of ideas is not to copy or 
represent particular things, nor is it the function of truth to be an 
"ideally" harmonious or coherent mental replica of reality. In- 
deed the pragmatist thinks that, since reality is muddy, incoherent 
and ever flowing, true ideas can never be parts of one coherent 
timeless whole of truth. 

T As Bradley seems to do with respect, especially, to the temporal character 
of experience. 



56 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

The pragmatist says that a true proposition is always one that 
leads to satisfactory consequences of some sort to some person or 
persons. And, by satisfactory consequences, he means all sorts of 
satisfactions. If A believes that B will lend him a thousand 
dollars, which he badly needs, on his note, and B actually lends 
him the money, then A's belief becomes true, because it has the 
anticipated satisfactory consequence. But the belief, pragmat- 
ically, is not true until B has actually agreed to loan the sum in 
question to A. It is true just in so far, and as soon, as the belief 
leads into the expected results. If the law of gravitation becomes 
true it will be because the belief in it will have satisfactory con- 
sequences and disbelief in it disastrous consequences. If A loves 
B and believes that B loves him, and if B reciprocates the affection, 
the consequences again are satisfactory and the belief becomes true. 
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If belief in a theorem 
in algebra or geometry will lead to the satisfactory consequence 
that it will harmonize with other theorems, and, perhaps, will have 
application in engineering, the theorem thus becomes true, but it 
was not true until the good consequences ensued. 

The pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there is no 
difference of truth that doesn't make a difference of fact somewhere; 
and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of opinion 
by making the discussion hinge, as soon as possible, upon some 
practical or particular issue. The principle of pure experience is also 
a methodical postulate. Nothing shall be admitted as fact, it says, 
except what can be experienced at some definite time by some experi- 
ent, and for every feature of fact so experienced, a definite place must 
be found somewhere in the final system of reality. In other words, 
everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and every kind of 
thing experienced must be somewhere real. 8 

In short, the sole test of the truth of ideas or propositions is 
to be found in their practical working values. "By their fruits ye 
shall know them." If the fruit is good the ideas become true. If 
the fruit is rotten, or produces a stomach ache, the ideas are false. 
And by good fruits the pragmatist means future satisfactory 
experiences. The pragmatist means, when he substitutes for 
static "verity," dynamic "verifiability," "workableness," or "cash 
value" in concrete experiences, that the claims to truth on the part 

s William James, A PluraUstio Universe, p. 372. 



THE CRITERIA OF KNOWLEDGE 57 

of ideas and propositions must be tested by the consequences which 
they lead to in the way of further experiences, and that the fruitage 
of an idea or proposition in concrete empirical value is the only 
measure of its truth. Thus he states what is obviously the inductive 
method of procedure ; an idea or proposition is a working hypothe- 
sis which is to be either corroborated or refuted by future empirical 
results. 

The pragmatist is clearly right in saying that, in the long run 
and taking account of the social and physical relations and effects 
of belief, true beliefs are those which will yield solid and lasting 
satisfactions; yield experimental and technical satisfactions in 
science and industry ; yield practical emotional satisfactions in the 
supplying of mail's daily wants ; yield satisfactions to the demands 
of his aesthetic, intellectual and moral nature. 

But the pragmatist has only told us that, if we try to verify our 
beliefs, by reference of propositions deduced from them to further 
experiences and to further actions and future feelings, either we 
shall verify them or we shall not verify them. Verified beliefs are 
satisfactory to the believer; refuted beliefs are unsatisfactory; 
but unrefuted beliefs may be satisfactory and yet false. A person 
may get much enjoyment from illusions and hallucinations ; in fact 
most of us do some of the time and some of us all or nearly all of 
the time. Human beings are particularly prone to cherishing 
illusions in regard to their own abilities, characters and even looks. 
These illusions are often very agreeable. 

Certainly, we can only know that a proposition is true by find- 
ing that it works well in some present or future context of action, 
thought, and feeling. But a proposition can only work satisfac- 
torily if it be true, that is, if it agree with fact and reason. The 
satisfaction that follows from belief in a given proposition depends, 
not on the believer's pious belief in it, nor on the psychical proposi- 
tion as an entertained mental content but on the truth of the prop- 
position. If I believe a proposition, and it has permanently satis- 
factory consequences, there must have been some truth in the 
proposition, but that truth was determined, not by my belief that 
it would have satisfactory results but, by the nature of things 
themselves with which my belief happened to agree. 

There are several ambiguities lurking in the way of prag- 
matism, for it attempts answers to at least three distinct problems. 
First is the problem of a method of procedure, the verification of 



58 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

ideas and propositions. The pragmatic postulate, that differences 
in the meanings and applications of ideas must correspond to dif- 
ferences of fact somewhere, somehow, and that if ideas have no 
differences in empirical consequences they must really mean the 
same thing, is a wholly sound method of procedure, so far as it can 
be applied. Indeed, it is just the empirical method. It is true 
that the ambiguity lurks in the word "makes" ; most human ideas 
do not make the facts or laws to which they correspond, if true. 
But ideas, in the shape of purposes and volitions, are dynamic 
facts which do alter the relation between other facts, and thus to 
some extent remake, or make over real facts. But even the 
volitional transformations of reality are subject to the actual struc- 
ture of reality as a whole. Volition works successfully within the 
narrow limits prescribed by the determinate constitution of reality. 
When Thomas Carlyle heard that Margaret Fuller Ossoli, the 
transcendentalist, had accepted the universe, he said: "Gad, she'd 
better." 

The pragmatist assumes, as William James puts it, that 
"reality is in the making and awaits a part of its complexion from 
the future." 

No doubt reality is, to some extent, always in the making, but 
the materials, and the ways of successful making, are not created 
by human wishes. They belong to the objective order which makes 
our ideas either true or false. 

The second problem is, in contrast to the statement of a method 
of verification, the problem of the criteria of truth. The pragmatic 
answer to this problem is that the criterion is satisfactoriness, 
agreeableness, good fruits, or cash value. But he neglects to tell 
us how we are to know good fruits from bad fruits, genuine cash 
from counterfeits, etc., in any other terms than satisfy ingness, 
agreeableness. James said the criterion is all kinds of satisfac- 
tions, affectional, aesthetic, moral and logical. What is the 
criterion of genuine and lasting satisfactoriness ? How is one to 
know when a belief in a theoretical proposition or a practical plan, 
which in its inception and embracement is enjoyable, will continue 
to yield intellectual or emotional gratification? "All is not gold 
that glitters" ; "far off pastures are green" ; "things are what they 
are, and they will be what they will be." In admitting that con- 
sistency or coherence between ideas and beliefs, is the most imperi- 
ous claimant of all, James really deviated from pure pragmatism. 



THE CRITERIA OF KNOWLEDGE 59 

Later pragmatists or instrumentalists, notably Mr. Dewey, make 
value for the furtherance of social welfare and individual happi- 
ness the most comprehensive criterion of satisfactoriness or truth. 
But while most reasonable human beings agree that the highest 
criteria of moral and social principles are social welfare and indi- 
vidual happiness, they disagree with regard to what constitutes 
social welfare and happiness, just as they disagree as to what 
constitutes lasting satisfaction. Moreover, there are many proposi- 
tions in symbolic logic, higher mathematics, physics, astronomy, 
other sciences, history, art, et cetera, which have no obvious bearing 
on social welfare or even on individual happiness. What, for 
instance, are the social consequences or satisfactions which make 
true Bertrand Russell's philosophy of mathematics, or Einstein's 
theory of the relativity of space and time, if they are true ? In 
what respect do these things add to the gayety of nations or indi- 
viduals ? Must we wait to see how they can be applied in further- 
ing democracy, or in industry, to decide whether these theories are 
true or not ? Are we to decide whether immortality, spiritualism, 
or materialism, are true or false, simply by asking: Which 
alternative would probably give most happiness to the largest 
number of human beings ? If feelings of satisfaction or happiness 
are the most ultimate criteria of the truth " of propositions, then 
the truest propositions are those for which the majority votes, and 
many propositions and values in such fields as higher mathematics, 
logic and metaphysics, astral physics, history and art, are neither 
true nor false, but insignificant, since only a very small minority 
entertain them at all and derive pallid pleasures from them. They 
are both practically useless and perhaps unpalatable truths. (I 
have very seldom derived any satisfaction from the deliverances of 
the comptometer at my bank, but I have invariably found its 
results to be annoyingly correct.) We may hope that somehow and 
somewhere every true proposition will yield satisfaction, but y?e do 
not know that this is so. The pragmatist says that an idea, to be 
true, must make a difference in reality. Certainly it must always 
make a difference to us in our relations to other parts of reality 
whether our ideas are true. Our ideas, if true, must lead to conse- 
quences of some sort; otherwise, they are otiose and unmeaning. 
False beliefs also lead to consequences, sometimes agreeable and 
sometimes not. But ideas and beliefs can work well in the long 
run for the individual and society only if they are in harmony with 



60 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the nature of reality as a whole, and provided that the nature of 
reality be in harmony with the permanent interests of human 
nature. That it is so, we all instinctively assume, but we have no 
absolute certainty of the truth of this assumption. It sometimes 
happens that between two or more inconsistent hypotheses or be- 
liefs, the facts do not give us unequivocal grounds for choosing. 
Two incompatible ideas may work equally well, affording equally 
good satisfactions. The moral standards of him who scorns de- 
lights and lives laborious days from a sense of duty and the 
unmoral principles of the prudent epicurean, may afford equal 
amounts of satisfaction to their respective votaries ; which then is 
true ? Pragmatically, it would seem that there can be no preferen- 
tial choice between them. 

Meanings, to be true, must be in harmony with the actual con- 
stitution of reality. The primary postulate of intelligent life is 
that reality is responsive to the organizing activity of thought. 
Perhaps this postulate gets increasing justification in the progress 
of knowledge and conduct ; but, since our interpretations of experi- 
ence change and grow, and our experience changes and grows with 
the interpretations, it cannot be maintained that any analysis and 
conceptual interpretation of experience is complete and final. On 
the other hand, many features of human experience are, on the 
whole, pretty constant. The elemental qualities of sense data, 
human affection, and the structure of thought, are irreducible. 
They are, as Mr. Kussell says, "hard data." There is no criterion 
by which we can determine whether we know reality as it may 
exist independently of our sense data, our affectional reactions 
thereto, and our conceptual interpretations thereof. We can have 
no concern with such an abstractly conceived world as reality in 
itself. The structural principles of thought and the valuations 
which result from our affectional reactions to sense data are all 
interwoven in the texture of what is for us the only actual world. 
We form our conceptual pictures of the world by the organization 
and interpretation of sense data, of our affectional evaluations, and 
of the relations between sense data and our affective life ; through 
reflective thinking. In this sense, man, as a perceiving, feeling, 
and above all, a rational or thinking being, is the measure of 
reality. For we can find no other. 

The pragmatist who finds the criterion of reality and truth in 
satisfaction, and the speculative idealist who argues that the 



THE CRITERIA OF KNOWLEDGE 61 

absolute satisfaction is to be found in the ideal of a strictly 
harmonious whole of experience, are not so far apart as at first 
blush they seem to be. The greatest difference between them is 
that, whereas the speculative idealist holds that his criterion of 
satisfaction is eternally real, and a termmus a quo, the pragmatist 
regards it as a goal to be indefinitely approximated to; that is, 
as a terminus ad quern. For the idealist the strictly harmonious 
whole is really here and now, as always. Our business is to de- 
cipher it and live by the light of our discovery. For the pragmatist 
this ideal harmony of experience is not now real, and our business 
is to make it more nearly real. For my own part I do not know 
whether reality is now a strictly harmonious whole. If it is not, 
we may be able to do something to make it a little more harmoni- 
ous, but our first business, as thinkers, is to find out what reality is 
like, and that is the whole business of metaphysics. / shall define 
reality as including everything which we must take account of in 
our thinking and willing. Alike in sense perception, in the in- 
tuition of logical relations, and in the appreciations or valuing 
reactions of human affection, it is the unavoidableness, the m- 
evitableness of the inferences and the acts, their congruence with 
one another and their repetition or persistence that constitute their 
reality. Sensory data we cannot abolish or pass through as through 
a mist. Whatever logical constructions we may set up to account for 
the stubborn persistence of the data, the affectional reactions or 
evaluations of experience that human beings make, such as desire 
and aversion, love and hate, are equally stubborn data. The logical 
principles, or fundamental modes of operation of thought, are a 
third set of stubborn data. I shall take reality then to include the 
most individual and private human feelings, views and valuations, 
no less than sensory data and logical principles. I shall take it to 
include the relations between these entities, to include those 
thought-constructed entities which are logically implicated in the 
structure of actual experience. Actuality belongs to the whole 
complex of experience, sensory, affectional, reflective, appreciative 
and volitional. It includes the particular data and their contexture 
of relations. Reality is not merely either subjective or objective, 
psychical or physical, sensuously particular or abstractly universal. 
It includes and transcends in its totality all of these. It is the 
whole of actual experience with its logical structure and implica- 
tions. The most comprehensive criterion of truth or knowledge is 



62 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

this: the truest propositions are those worked out by the most 
thoroughgoing analysis of sensory data, affective attitudes and 
conative acts, and by the most comprehensive synthesis or organiza- 
tion of the results of analysis under the guidance of the intellectual 
principles of cwtegorialness, comprehensiveness and consistency. 
A proposition is categorial if its data cannot be broken up into 
more elementary ones. By comprehensiveness I mean that truth 
requires that we should regard the relevancy of propositions to one 
another, and by consistency I mean that true propositions cannot 
contradict one another. 

The third problem involved in James' statement of pragmatism 
is this: must every so-called fact, to be recognized as real fact, 
be experienceable, that is, be conceivable as under definite assign- 
able conditions existing for some actual or hypothetical experient ? 
An affirmative answer to this question means this : knowable real- 
ity is experienceable reality, and unexperienceable reality is as 
good as nonexistent. Now there may be realities which are not and 
never will be empirical facts. It cannot be gainsaid that there 
may be existent things that are not only beyond the range of all 
actual experience, but, as well, beyond the range of all possible 
experience. To have insisted on this point is one merit of neo- 
realism. On the other hand, all reality that can be matter for 
intelligible discussion must be either matter of actual experience 
or conceivable as, under definite and assignable conditions, becom- 
ing matter of experience. All our scientific and philosophical 
doctrines are subject, of course, to the qualification that the whole 
field of human experience and its interpretation may be one vast 
illusion, may be an original distortion of a real existence whose 
character is in some wholly inscrutable fashion different from our 
world. But this abstract possibility need not disturb us. Motley 
is the garb we wear, and it would be folly to discard or neglect to 
repair our own livery because, perchance, we may cut a sorry figure 
in the eyes of some unknowable cosmic joker. In science and in 
philosophy, as in practical life, we are limited to the world of 
human experience and its organization and conceptual extension in 
the pursuit of our affectional and logical aims. Anything beyond 
the human world, by which we might reinterpret or reconstruct its 
character, could affect our world only by becoming an integral part 
thereof. Any absolute, into which our human world is absorbed 
or transmuted, no one knows how or to what extent, is both prac- 






THE CRITERIA OF KNOWLEDGE 63 

tically useless and logically worthless. In this sense all philosophy 
must necessarily be humanistic. 

Truth is the reflective apprehension and the expression in sym- 
bols of the relations, in other words of the theoretical meanings and 
the practical values, that constitute the texture of experience. 
Even the most abstract and symbolic principles of pure logic and 
mathematics derive from and refer back to the texture of experi- 
ence. In the various partial systems, which constitute the bodies 
of special sciences and particular knowledges, emphasis may fall 
principally on the universal relationships as in pure logic and 
mathematics; or it may fall chiefly on the significant qualitative 
values and special relationships of individual beings and events, as 
in history, biography, art, belles lettres. There are, in the total 
field of knowledge and conduct, many grades of varying emphasis 
on unique fact and universal; but, wherever reality has meaning 
and can thus be subject matter of knowledge or intelligent practice, 
both must be present and interwoven in some degree. Philosophy's 
task is to correct a one-sided emphasis on special types of fact and 
special types of relational connections or universals, to see that 
justice is done to the integral nature of truth and life. Philos- 
ophy's fruit resides in no mystical intuition of a transcendental 
order, but in that settled determination to see life steadily and to 
see it whole, which alone will deliver men from intellectual provin- 
cialism and practical parochialism. 

Every specific judgment in regard to existence depends for its 
truth on its consistency with actual experience and its consistency 
with further experiences. If a judgment clash with a concrete 
experience, the meaning of its experiental context has been mis- 
conceived. On the other hand there are various sorts of dishar- 
monies in actual experience. Hence a judgment or inference 
which expresses a disharmony in experience may be true, and a 
judgment which expresses a harmony may be false because incon- 
sistent with fact. The ultimate ideal of truth, as the significant 
and coherent awareness of reality, must not be taken to mean that 
reality contains no conflicts, no unreconciled oppositions. It does 
not take a professional philosopher to see that conflict and opposition 
are cardinal features in the individual life as well as of the social 
and cosmic orders. Indeed, the philosopher must beware lest, in 
his persistent quest for the intellectual vision of a cosmic order, he 
read his own passionate desire for harmony and totality over 



64 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

hastily into the tangled facts of experience. To do this is to com- 
mit what is the philosopher's fallacy par excellence. The agree- 
ment of thought with reality does not mean that truth is the reflec- 
tion of a completely harmonious experience or perfect world order. 
Harmony or self-consistency in thought and feeling is the ideal 
standard of our intellectual quest, as of our practical conations, our 
aesthetic visions and our religious aspirations. But such harmony 
is never our actual and complete possession. Truth, as a human 
achievement, is the progressing reflective awareness of the sys- 
tematic interrelations of all the qualitative elements of reality. 
But actual reality ever remains, for us men, full of problems and 
disharmonies. If reality be ultimately a coherent whole, its con- 
flicts and discords will somehow enter into it as constituent ele- 
ments. The philosopher has a twofold problem on his hands — 
what are the ultimate qualitative constituents of reality and what 
are their interrelations ? 

Actual reality is the whole content of experience. Of this the 
interpretative activity of thought is an inexpugnable part. Since 
actual reality is never a completely given and harmonious whole 
of fact, it is always in part an intellectual problem. A fact may 
be a partial answer to a specific problem, but it always starts up 
another problem. The fact is always a fragmentary experience 
enmeshed in a context of relations. The correspondence test of 
truth applies most obviously to the agreement of judgment and 
beliefs with immediate experience. A proposition that points to 
an immediate experience is proved by comparison with the kind 
of experience it points to. The lack of agreement between a 
proposition and a concrete experience requires either the revision 
or the rejection of the proposition. On the other hand an imme- 
diate experience points beyond itself just as truly as a proposition 
about immediate experience. Our judgments and beliefs, on the 
one hand, and our immediate experiences, on the other hand, must 
harmonize, and we can draw no hard and fast line between imme- 
diate experiences and their meanings. Moreover, there are many 
propositions claiming to be true which lie beyond the range of com- 
plete verification in immediate experience. Such are all universal 
relations in pure logic and mathematics, many new generalizations 
in physical science, alleged facts of history, and ethical and 
religious valuations. Into these fields we are led, and through 
them we are guided, by the ideal of a harmonious whole of truth 






THE CRITERIA OF KNOWLEDGE 65 

and life. Thus, the never completely realized ideal of the har- 
monious whole is the very nerve of truth seeking and all practical 
endeavor. Thus the specific and concrete agreements of judgments 
and beliefs with fact are stages in the realization of the ideal of 
significant harmony as the ultimate goal of thought and life. 
Guided by this ideal we may rationally believe in the reality of 
entities that we never expect to experience directly, because this 
belief is logically implied both in the theoretical and practical 
continuity of experience. For example, I have never directly ex- 
perienced the immediate reality of other personal centers of affect- 
ive experience ; but, logically, affectively, and ethically, my world 
would be a bedlam without this belief. For similar reasons, I 
believe in the physical constituents of the stars and in the dynamic 
or spatial or temporal continuity of the physical universe. Per- 
sonally I find myself constrained, for similar reasons, to believe in 
the continuity of life. Why ? Because without such beliefs actual 
experience would be incoherent. Thus sensory and affectional 
experiences are never self-complete. They never stand wholly on 
their own feet. If they could there would be no need of scientific 
theories nor of ethical, philosophical or religious doctrines. More- 
over the nonexperienced entities in which we believe also include 
entities that we may never expect to see face to face. My belief in 
a rational and righteous world order may be valid, though I may 
never expect to see face to face the sustainer of this world order. 
We believe in these nonexperienced entities, because such belief 
is the ultimate consequence of the fundamental working assump- 
tion of science and conduct; that reality is a coherent whole in 
which the meanings of our actual experience are constituent fac- 
tors, although we may not be able to see how the latter enter as 
integral elements into an intuition of the whole. This working 
assumption is what is meant by the hypothesis of the rationality of 
the universe. The inconsistencies in actual experience, and in its 
interpretations, impel thought to the reconstruction of experience 
and its interpretations. By this continuous reconstruction we 
make our knowledge and our conduct more harmonious with reality 
— that is, we make the bits of reality which we are more har- 
monious with the universe. The adequate interpretation of actual 
experience. requires that it be enlarged and completed by belief in 
a conceptual reality of which the empirical reality is but a partial 
aspect. The fuller and mar© harmonious conceptual reality is a 



66 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

realm of concrete possibilities, since some of the conditions of its 
being are actually present in empirical reality and in the logical, 
ethical and aesthetic demands of selves. For example, that one 
shall make a valuable discovery in science, aid materially in the 
work of social reconstruction, realize a moral ideal, or write a great 
drama or novel — all these are concrete or real possibilities, since 
some of the conditions of their fulfillment are actual in the em- 
pirical world of nature and humanity. Promises and potencies of 
future fulfillment of purposes and values must be as real as 
empirical fact. The universe is a storehouse of determinate possi- 
bilities for human thinkers and doers. 

The validity of knowledge presupposes (1) that the mind has, 
at some points at least, immediate acquaintance with reality ; and 
(2) that those parts of reality which do not consist of the individual 
mind's acts of knowing exist independently of the individual 
mind. One must reject the argument that, since an immediate 
acquaintance with actuality is matter for or before conscious 
experience, therefore one cannot know anything that does not 
exist in some consciousness. This argument interchanges for 
"before or present to" and "in" in the sense of "dependent on." 
While, on the one hand, the character of the sensory system of the 
experient and the structure of his thought is implicated in the 
character of the objects experienced and related, on the other hand 
it is an assumption wholly without warrant to say that the natures 
of the objects experienced must be constituted or even distorted 
by being experienced and thought. The human consciousness may 
be, to some extent, pellucid. If thinking cannot grasp relations 
objective to the thinker the case is hopeless for any knowledge. 

To sum up: The pragmatist rightly insists that ideas, to be 
true, must somewhere and sometime correspond with facts ; must, 
in sho^t, find factual fulfillment. He is wrong when he argues that 
those ideas, and those alone, which seem to satisfy the immediate 
practical and emotional interests of individuals or social groups 
are therefore true ; he is overlooking the stubborn and determinate 
character both of the order of brute physical fact and of the order 
of psychical and logical fact. The absolute idealist is right in 
insisting that the very structure of reason or thought is such that 
contradictory propositions cannot be accepted by it and that it is 
of the very essence of mind, in all its phases, to seek harmony or 
consistency in experience and its interpretations. He is wrong in 



THE CRITERIA OF KNOWLEDGE 67 

so far as he assumes that an eternal or supertemporal harmony is 
the only true reality; thus discounting the meaning of the actual 
discords and conflicts in human experience with the glib and use- 
less formula that these discords are all transmuted and absorbed 
in the beautiful bliss of the eternal harmony — the formula is 
useless until we are told just how the transmutation is to be 
wrought. 

Truth is the most adequate and consistent agreement of the 
meanings, distilled by reflexion from experimental fact, with fact 
and with one another. 



CHAPTEK V 

KNOWLEDGE AND EEALITY 1 

What is the relation of cognition to its objects ? There are two 
extreme answers to this question — epistemological monism and 
epistemological dualism. The monist holds that, in every case of 
genuine knowing, the state or act of knowing is identical with its 
objects. In so far as I am a knower I am identical with what I 
know. In perceiving a physical object the thing perceived is 
identical with the state of perception. In Berkeley's words, esse 
est percipi. Similarly, in imagining or conceiving anything the 
mental process must be existentially identical with what is con- 
ceived or imagined. It follows that all reality is matter of experi- 
ence, content of an experient's mind. The doctrine is identified 
with naive realism, the belief that we always know things exactly 
as they are. If this means the naivete of the man in the street, I 
must demur. So far as I know him, he is not quite so unsophis- 
ticated. 

Let it be denied that the experient experiences himself. Then 
from the premises of epistemological monism, since all reality 
is experience, the experient is nonexistent, and experience is a 
fatherless and motherless waif; it turns into a neutral world of 
pure experience (a la James) ; then since experience without an 
experient is a bit thick it is changed, by the new realists, into a 
world of neutral entities which are neither fish, flesh nor fowl. The 
good Bishop of Cloyne would turn in his grave at the sight of his 
progeny. But the neutral entities are logically descended from 
Berkeley. Begin by denying the duality of cognition and its 
objects, and the validity of constructing a concept of material sub- 
stance since it is not actually experienced, and logically the self 



1 This and the following chapters are in part the revised form of a discus- 
sion first printed, under the title "Perception and Physical Ideality,' ' in The 
Philosophical Review, Vol. xix, No. i, January, 1910, pp. 1-21. 

68 



KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 69 

goes the same way, as Hume the enfant terrible of British men- 
talism showed ; then experience or reality ceases to be experience ; 
it cannot be matter and there is no mind ; there is nothing left for 
it but neutrality. 2 

Let us take monism as a hypothesis and work it. If the mind 
is wholly identical with the objects of its knowing then Berkeley- 
anism or "mentalism" follows as the night from day. Whatsoever 
exists can exist only as the content of some conscious subject or 
experient. If I must believe that a part of my experience-content 
exists when I am not experiencing it, then it must exist in and for 
some other mind. But, if all that I know be what I experience, 
how do I know that any other mind exists % I do not experience 
immediately any other self, and if I did he would be but my idea, 
which 'might not be very satisfactory to him. Berkeley argues that 
I know that I do not cause my own ideas or objects of knowledge 
to exist, since they come and go, at least to a large extent, inde- 
pendently of my will; therefore, they must have an originating 
and sustaining cause independent of me. Now, I am immediately 
aware of myself as a cause ; therefore the independent cause of my 
experience must be another will or self. Certainly I would never 
be conscious of myself as willing or as a cause unless there were 
obstacles to my desires and purposes. Therefore my consciousness 
of willing presupposes the existence of something real independent 
of my will ; but this something is not, of necessity, another will. 
For instance, I do not have to assume that the inertia of the table 
is a case of countervolition. The table does not, in the least, 
behave like a self. Moreover, I become conscious of myself as 
will, only in conflict and cooperation with centers of resist- 
ance and cooperation, which I recognize as being other than 
myself and, because of differences in behavior between these 
other centers of resistance (some of them can be persuaded, 
intimidated or enticed into acting with and for me), I am led to 
make a distinction between nonvolitional or physical centers of 
inertia and action and other volitional centers. In fact it is not 
possible to account for my coming to full self-consciousness at all, 



2 The supposed duality between knowledge and its objects has been con- 
fused with, and indeed based on, the metaphysical two-substance dualism of 
mind and body. The two problems are quite distinct, though related ; we shall 
not get forward unless we keep them distinct. Our present concern is with the 
duality of subject and object in cognition. 



70 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

except in social relations with other centers of consciousness. 
Thus, Berkeley's argument falls to the ground, unless it be first 
assumed that other finite centers of volition exist. He assumes, 
without proof, the existence of human society. He is a social and 
psychical realist and pluralist. 

Now, given a society of selves (two will be enough), the 
cognitively primary objective or real world is that which appears 
to exist in common for these selves. If a physical object is real for 
me I must believe that any normal self would perceive its existence, 
if placed under the same conditions as I am under. The percep- 
tions of an abnormal self, that is, one out of key with the social 
normality, would be explained in terms of his deviation from the 
normal or social standard. To say that a judgment or a series of 
judgments is true, that a concept or law is valid, is to say, in effect, 
that other selves, with the same sensory and intellectual make-up, 
would recognize it to be true under the same conditions. The 
cognized existence of a common or real physical world presupposes 
an identity of function, and hence, of structure, in different selves. 
On the other hand, if two selves do not perceive quite the same 
thing (in the case, say, of color or tone discriminations) they can 
discover and recognize the reasons why they do not perceive quite 
the same thing. But the possibility of this recognition presupposes 
an identity of perceptual and intellectual function in different 
selves. 

Thus, it is impossible to account for knowledge without pre- 
supposing the existence of at least one other self than the knower. 
The admission of physical objectivity presupposes the admission 
of the reality of society. The cognized objective order is a function 
of the social order. And, if one refuses to make the admission and 
accepts the logical consequence, solipsistic subjectivism, namely — 
that he knows only that he himself exists as a conscious being, the 
reply is that, when he says this he announces that there are other 
conscious beings. If I say that "I" a'm the only self that I am 
sure really exists, the sentence has meaning only because I sur- 
reptitiously assume the existence of other "I" 's. For genetic 
psychology clearly shows that the consciousness of the "I" is con- 
ditioned by the consciousness of other "I" 's. What sense is there 
in affirming my own existence, if there be no one else to recognize 
my existence or to challenge my affirmation ? The solipsist forgets 
that his own consciousness is relative to, and implies the recog- 



KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 71 

nition of, and by, other selves. The existence of community and 
the power of communication are the presuppositions of all human 
agreements and disagreements in regard to an objective or real 
world. 

Furthermore, a considerable part of our knowledge is repre- 
sentative or symbolical. When I say, "I know the content of a 
certain book," or "I know a certain place other than where I am," 
or "I know the Darwinian theory or the theory of gravitation," 
I mean that I have "ideas" or trains of sentences, pictorial images 
and scientific symbols, which I believe to represent the realities in 
question. I do not mean that I as knower am the book or the 
place or the theory in question. Knowing always involves a duality 
\ — a relation between images, words or symbols with meanings for 
some knower and the objects which these images or symbols mean. 
To mean, may be to picture, point to, or express by a symbol, a 
quality or relation of the thing meant, such as a color, a mode of 
behavior, an ethical value. Thus far, the position of epistemo- 
logical dualism is correct. The being of knowing is not identical 
with the being of the objects of knowledge. The cognitive differ- 
ence between sensation and perception, for instance, is that sensa- 
tion consists in a sensory process whose setting and relations are 
not clearly cognized, whereas a perception is a clear cognition ; the 
difference between a dumb feeling and an awareness is that in 
dumb feeling we are not aware that we feel. 

Naive realism tries to get around the duality of knowing and 
its objects by the doctrine that knowing consists in the knower's 
ideas copying or representing the objects known. In perception 
the knower is not aware of having copies of things in his mind. 
Perception is an attitude in which the percipient is immediately 
aware of the object perceived. But there are memory-images and 
symbols (words and pictures) to represent objects not present to 
sense. And there are other knowers, whose acts and words do not 
indicate that they perceive things in quite the same way that I do. 
There is color blindness ; there are variations in the perceptions of 
sizes, shapes, odors, tastes ; there are, in short, many sorts of dif- 
ferences between the percepts of different percipients; and even 
the same percipient varies from time to time in his perception 
of the supposedly same object. If one must assume that the things 
perceived are identical with the perception of them, it would fol- 
low that there are as many distinct things as there are distinct 



72 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

percepts. 3 Suppose all the people on this half of the earth to 
be perceiving a sun simultaneously ; then there would be, perhaps, 
800,000,000 suns ; suppose they all shut their eyes for five minutes, 
then all these suns would vanish and 800,000,000 new suns 
would spring into existence when they opened their eyes again. 
But there does seem to be some degree of constancy and order 
about the qualities and appearances of the sun. The simplest 
hypothesis is that there is one sun, which is perceived by everybody 
and that everybody perceives it according to his sensory and mental 
equipment and history and position. Such is the view of common 
sense. It escapes one difficulty to fall into another. If all our 
perceptions are copies of objects, how can we know how good copies 
they are, or that they do not wholly misrepresent the originals, 
unless we can perceive the originals ? And how can we perceive the 
originals, unless our percepts are at least parts or aspects of the 
originals. 

There is a duality in knowing that cannot be overcome, but, 
if it be a dualism, then all knowing, so-called, is reduced to the 
status of subjective states. It all may be, as Locke put it, "bare 
vision." 

But, if we admit an inherent duality in the knowing process, 
are we not committed to 'phenomenalism, all along the line — to the 
view that we know, not reality or things in themselves, but only 
their phenomena or appearances? Does not the admission that 
ideas are representatives or symbols of realities other than them- 
selves commit one to the further admission that one cannot say 
just what ideas represent and how far and how well they are 
representative ? Would it not follow that the only way to know 
reality would be to transcend reflective knowledge in an immediate 
experience, in which the distinction of subject and object in "know- 
ing would be dissolved in am, immediacy, like unto, but higher than, 
the immediacy of mere sensation or feeling ? Such is the conclu- 
sion that philosophers traveling over such diverse roads as Plotinus, 
Fichte, Schelling, F. H. Bradley, William James and Henri 
Bergson seem to reach. 

Once the epistemological monism of the naive realist is aban- 
doned, philosophy seems committed to a phenomenalistic view of 
knowledge, from which there is no escape except by way of the 

•Hume saw this. Cf. Treatise, Book i, Part iv, Sect. 2. 



KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 73 

transcendence of the knowledge relation in some ineffable and 
incommunicable experience or mystic intuition. How can know- 
ing transcend itself and remain knowing? Must it not die to 
live again in some sort of immediate experience, an aboriginal flow 
of feeling or self -transcending intuition, if the self is to reach 
reality ? 

There are various forms and shades of phenomenalism. The 
one principle which they have in common is that it is not possible 
for the human mind, by reflective knowing, to transcend itself, to 
break out of the charmed circle of its own processes and to lay 
hold on the real stuff of reality. The chief varieties of phenomen- 
alism are: (1) The sensationalistic or impressionistic phenomen- 
alism of Hume, J. S. Mill, T. H. Huxley, Ernst Mach, Karl 
Pearson, and many scientists. 4 (2) The rationalistic phenomen- 
alism of Kant and his orthodox followers. (3) Related to the 
latter doctrine are the immediatist doctrine of Mr. F. H. Bradley, 
the immediatism of William James and the intuitionism of M. 
Bergson ; these thinkers, reaching by different routes the conclusion 
that conceptualizing or reflective thinking does not acquaint us 
with the nature of reality, find reality in an immediate experience, 
feeling, or intuition. 

1. Hume's doctrine that we know only our own impressions and 
the traces left by them, together with the associational linkages 
formed among them, by force of contiguity, repetition and resem- 
blance, logically leads to agnostic phenomenalism and solipsism. 
We may believe in an external world and other selves, but we have 
no rational grounds for such beliefs. Their basis is instinct and 
custom. Hume was consistent in holding that we do not know 
whether there is any objective reality, much less what it is like. 5 
He fails, however, to account for the belief in it, as well as for the 
fact that our ideas and calculations are, to a large extent, verified 
by the course of experience. In fact, like all thoroughpaced 
skepticism, Hume's doctrine not only does not account for the suc- 



4 The ' l Transfigured Eealism ' ' of Herbert Spencer is a restatement of the 
negative or phenomenalistic arguments of Kant ; but Spencer breaks through 
the circle of subjectivism with the argument that our immediate consciousness 
of force, revealed in the sense of effort, entitles us to conclude to the absolute 
reality of force or energy; the ultimate and basic reality is an infinite and 
eternal energy from which all things proceed. 

"Hume, Treatise, Book i, especially Part iv. Hume, of course, was clear- 
sighted enough to see the logical consequence of his own skepticism. 



74 MAN AND THE COSMOS 






cessful practical working of our postulates or beliefs about reality ; 
but, moreover, it does not account for the necessity that the skeptic 
is under, like other men, of making such postulations. Why should 
a solipsistic skeptic ever take the trouble to state even his negative 
theory of knowledge if he is in doubt whether there is any one to 
hear him or read him, and especially since he himself only exists 
as a passing thought % 

The analysis of perception by psychology, physiology and 
physics seems to give foundation for a scientific phenomenalism 
such as one finds in Karl Pearson. Perception and conception, it 
is said, deal only with appearances, not with things in themselves, 
since scientific analysis shows that what we actually sense are 
patches of color and shape, sensations of movement, solidity, rough- 
ness and smoothness, odors, tastes, heat and cold. These sense 
data we group into things, we know not why. These sense data are 
produced, or at least conditioned, by nerve processes and other 
processes in the sense organs, nerve fibers and the cortical areas of 
the cerebrum. The nerve processes in turn are determined by 
motions in external media (undulatory vibrations of the electro- 
magnetic ether, of air particles, etc.) that have no resemblance to 
the sense data. It would follow that when I perceive all I really 
know is that I, as this present feeling, am having sensations, or that 
the present feeling feels itself. The ego is like a telephone girl 
sitting at the exchange and talking and switching, but never having 
seen wires, instruments or persons outside; or like a bank teller 
receiving and handling currency, but never knowing what it stands 
for in the commercial world. Thus we are led to a new form of 
solipsism. 6 If the girl or the teller know nothing about the tele- 
phone system or the currency system, then I fail to see what 
meaning they would find in doing their work. The girl would 
not know that she was a switch girl if she did not know what 
switches were for, and this she could not know without knowing 
about real selves at the other end of real wires. 

In order to distinguish a patch of color or a feeling of hardness 
from a nerve process, and both from an undulatory vibration or a 
dance of electrons, it is necessary that we should know what nerve 
processes and motions in the ether mean, that is, what they stand 



•K. Pearson, Grammar of Science, 3d edition, Chap. 2, ''The Facts of 
Science. ' ' 



KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 75 

for experientially. A nerve process is either an observable fact, 
hence socially accessible, or it is a conceptual construct which has a 
social meaning and function. An undulation in the ether, or a 
dance of electrons, is in the same case. In so far as the physio- 
logical conditions of sense perception are observable, that means 
that they are verifiable social realities which are conditions of indi- 
vidual experiences. Since nerve currents, undulations of the ether 
and movements of electrons are not observable facts they are con- 
ceptual constructs which have a social function. 

It is a fallacy to say that because, forsooth, some kind of 
physical motion may be a sine qua non of nerve processes, and 
nerve processes a sine qua non of perceptions, therefore perceptions 
are mere 'phenomena and the nerve processes or the physical 
motions are the real realities. Thinkers and experients are just 
as real as any other factors in this world. That physical motions 
are causal conditions of perception is true, that nerve processes are 
necessary links in the causal chain is true too ; but it is equally true 
that a percipient organism is the centrally necessary condition of 
there being a perceived object, and that several like-minded and 
like-organed percipients are indispensable conditions for the recog- 
nizable existence of a perceived objective world. The primary 
solid and endurmg world is, not the realm of motions, of colorless, 
soundless and odorless mass particles in the void, but the world of 
actual and possible social or standardized experience, and inter- 
pretation thereof. 

It is not even the case that, when I perceive, I see only a patch 
of color in my private space 7 and that I suppose my percept to be 
private. I never could distinguish my perception from yours, 
and suppose anything private about mine, if I did not first believe 
that your experience and mine were of a common object existing 
in a world of public space. The recognition of a public realm of 
objects of experience is, both psychologically and logically, the 
condition prerequisite to the recognition of individual variations in 
the perception of parts of this world. Variations in perception, 
even illusions and hallucinations, refer to the common objective 
order of the space-time world. This objective order has a com- 
munal existence ; it is the matrix of a world of selves. 



T As Mr. B. Russell supposes, cf. Our Knowledge of the External World, 
Lectures iii and iv. 



76 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

2. Kantian phenomenalism differs from sensationalistic phe- 
nomenalism in holding that the world of human experience 
is not the world of things in themselves; not merely be- 
cause the nature of things is discolored or transformed by- 
passing through the disturbing media of human sense organs; 
but, more especially, because the mind must first organize 
the chaotic sense material into the world of knowledge by 
the application of forms of synthetic thinking — space, time and 
the categories, such as causality and substantiality — before there 
can be any recognition of an objective world. These forms of 
synthesis transform the chaotic manifold of the senses into things, 
thus introducing into the sense-material various relations of order, 
such as unity, causal sequence and interrelation, substantiality. 
Kant, like most other philosophers, assumes that he knows that 
there are other selves and never explains or justifies that knowl- 
edge. In short, he assumes human society without further ado, 
and makes the empirically or phenomenally real external world 
the world which exists in common for like-minded percipients and 
thinkers. 

Now, besides the latter assumption which in some form is in- 
evitable, Kant makes two gratuitous assumptions. These are: (1) 
that sensation, the raw material of our known world of phenomena, 
is a chaotic manifold; (2) that the forms of mental synthesis, 
which bring order into the chaos, and thus build up a physical 
world, do not correspond with the structural character of reality-in- 
itself . The second assumption is an inevitable consequence of the 
first and vice versa. There seem to have been two motives in 
Kant for these assumptions : (1) the influence of Hume's atomistic 
and impressionistic theory of knowledge. (Kant's doctrine of 
sensation seems to be derived from Hume's doctrine that our 
seeming world is compounded, by the principles of association, out 
of atomistic sense-impressions. This accounts for Kant's first 
assumption.) (2) The influence of the antinomies or contradic- 
tions involved, as Kant thought, in admitting the objective reality 
of space, time and causality. 

But Humian atomism is psychologically false. There is no 
actual state or phase of experience, however primitive, which con- 
sists of atomistic sense impressions or particles of color, sound, 
shape, size, smell, etc., which are afterwards patched together into 



KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 77 

percepts. 8 As for the second assumption, some other and less 
violent way can be found to escape the seeming contradiction in 
admitting that space, time, and causality represent true aspects 
of the real world order. 

3. The dialectical phenomenalism of Bradley proceeds, by a 
critical analysis of things, qualities, relations, space, time, the 
self, and the subject-object relation in knowing and willing, to show 
that all these phases of knowing are involved in hopeless contra- 
dictions. The ideal of truth and reality is an individual whole, 
consistent or harmonious in itself, an all-inclusive, systematic 
unity, embracing all finite diversities in one perfect individual 
experience. All appearances are present in it and it is present in 
all appearances, but in different degrees. The absolute reality 
lives in all its appearances, and in it they are all transmuted, in 
various degrees, into the harmony of the whole. 

We cannot tell what the absolute is like in detail, but we can 
know its general features for, in immediate experience or feeling, 
especially in love and aesthetic feeling, we have experiences which 
are one and many, unity-in-diversity. Bradley's phenomenalism 
thus differs from other forms in that he holds that, while thought 
does not give us a knowledge of reality in detail, it does tell us what 
reality must be like as a whole. It gives us the general outlines ; 
thus knowledge points beyond itself towards a more perfect whole 
into which it is transmuted. Knowledge, in the sense of reflective 
thought, is not invalidated in its own sphere. It is incomplete, but 
good as far as it goes. Thought is immanent in reality ; it grows 
out of immediate experience and its function is to render the latter 
more coherent and significant ; but it can never apprehend the true 
and harmonious nature of the real, since it is always infected with 
duality. Thought divorces the "that" or immediate richness of 
sensuous experience and feeling from the "what" or meaning; it 
analyzes or breaks up the immediate existence which is concrete 
experience, and can never get the parts together into a perfect 
whole. The fate of reflective thinking in Mr. Bradley's system 
reminds one of Humpty Dumpty. I shall have occasion from time 
to time to consider this and other features of Mr. Bradley's doc- 
trine and shall not discuss it here. 

8 As James Ward has shown, knowledge develops as a progressive differen- 
tiation in a continuum of experience. See his article " Psychology ' f in the 
Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition, and Psychological Principles. 



78 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

M. Bergson's whole philosophy rests on the contrast between 
the functions of intelligence and of intuition. 9 Intelligence is 
adapted to deal only with the inert, the solid, the homogeneous or 
spatialized ; it is at home with matter ; its model of procedure is 
geometry, the science of static and homogeneous spatial form. 
Keality is flux, duration, interpenetration, the creative movement 
of the vital impulse or life urge. The nature of reality is appre- 
hended directly by intuition. "By intuition is meant the kind of 
intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an 
object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and conse- 
quently inexpressible. ... To analyze is to express a thing as a 
function of something other than itself. All analysis is thus a 
translation, a development into symbols." 10 Thus analysis does 
not" tell us what anything really is ; to get the real and unique 
being or nature of anything we must have resort to intuition. But 
we have, or may have, an intuition of one being — our self. There- 
fore, in order to find the clue to reality, we must, by an act of 
intellectual sympathy or intuition, place ourselves within ourselves. 
Metaphysics is possible, that is, first-hand knowledge of reality is 
possible, only if symbols can be dispensed with. This can be done 
if one begin with intuition of oneself. "No image or concept can 
reproduce exactly the original feeling I have of the flow of my own 
conscious life. But it is not even necessary that I should attempt 
to render it. If a man is incapable of getting for himself the intui- 
tion of the constitutive duration of his own being, nothing will 
ever give it to him, concepts no more than images. Here the single 
aim of the philosopher should be to promote a certain effort, which 
in most men is usually fettered by habits of mind more useful to 
life." n These habits are the intellectual habits of measuring and 
operating on solids. Thus, for M. Bergson, knowledge of reality 
is reached at all points by interpreting it in terms derived from 
the intuition of oneself as a being which is a continuous creative 
advance, a flux in which all its elements interpenetrate ; which is 
all at once, " variety of qualities, continuity of progress, and unity 
of direction." 12 

9 The clearest and most concise statement of M. Bergson's theory of 
knowledge will be found in his An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by 
T. E. Hulme, from which I quote. (There is another translation entitled An 
Introduction to a New Philosophy.) 

10 Ibid, p. 7. 

n An Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 15, 16. n Ibid., p. 15. 



KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 79 

M. Bergson assumes that whatever is real is, in some degree, 
like a self, therefore whatsoever kind or degree of knowledge does 
not acquaint us with some bit or vortex of psychical flux, some 
rudimentary or developed soul, is simply not genuine knowledge. 
If reality be mind-energy, then, since I know directly only my own 
mind-energy, the intuitive act by which I possess this self- 
knowledge is the only kind of knowledge worthy of the name. 
Therefore neither geometry nor any science which uses geometry 
gives us knowledge ; in order to know reality all I have to do is to 
enter within myself by intellectual sympathy; having learned to 
know myself, I must dilate or dilute this self -intuition and I shall 
know something about everything, since every thing is a bit of 
mind-energy or pure duration. 

I find in this theory of knowledge Fichte and Schelling 
redivivus. Die intellectuelle Anschauung is poetized, dressed up 
in an attractive literary garb and furbished out with an array of 
scientific facts. I cannot grant the initial assumption that, because 
the knower is always an ego or individual, therefore all that he 
knows must be known in precisely the same way that he knows that 
he has a toothache or is in love ; from which it would follow that 
everything really known or knowable must be like the ego. This 
is "malicious" philosophy, indeed. It is the "egocentric predica- 
ment" with a vengeance. It would seem an easy step, from the 
position that all that one knows is like one's ego, to the position 
that all that one knows as real is a part of one's ego. M. Bergson's 
theory of knowledge escapes none of the difficulties of psychological 
idealism or mentalism. It only appears to do so, because he 
assumes, in the spirit of physical dynamism or energetics, that the 
physical world consists solely of various rates of movement, of 
mobilities having a variety of tensions but no things that move; 
and because he assumes that our perceptions are condensations and 
frozen images of the labile mobilities. I do not understand how 
the intellect can have been developed as the most successful instru- 
ment for the adjustment of the vital impulse to materiality, if 
materiality be itself the frozen images produced by the intellect, 
and if this highly successful instrument so grossly distorts and 
petrifies the reality to which the individual bits of the vital impulse 
must adapt themselves in order to survive and prosper. Either the 
material conditions to which the intellect must adapt itself are 
presupposed, and the processes of perception and conception are 



80 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

successful adaptations thereto, and therefore not distortions 
thereof; or else perception and conception engender illusions, and 
beings who act upon these illusions as true must perish. If intelli- 
gence so mangles reality that we can get a true glimpse of the latter 
only by looking within our own bosoms, how has it happened that 
the most intelligent animals have acquired the greatest powers of 
survival ? I do not question the reality of what I see when I look 
within myself ; but, if this be the only kind of reality, how comes 
it that I survive and grow in physical and mental stature by taking 
account of and adapting my life to a kind of thing that, on the face 
of it, seems to be quite other than what I find when I look within ? 
If there be really no "other" than mind or psychical life in the 
universe, why the persistent seeming of an other? Why should 
minds grow by adaptation to this other ? Fichte explains the gene- 
sis of materiality from the moral vocation of the ego. The physical 
world for him exists only as "the sensuous material of our duties," 
the shock or stimulus which is the occasion for the development of 
the rational will. But, if the material be only unconscious will, 
why should this occasion be necessary ? For Fichte the material 
world is engendered by the will as a kind of punching-bag on which 
it may get up its muscle by becoming consciously rational. For 
M. Bergson the intelligence is developed by the vital impetus as a 
successful tool for adaptation to the material conditions of living ; 
but matter, in turn, appears to be the by-product of the intelligence. 
The existence of matter is a condition of the existence of intelli- 
gence; but, intelligence, in turn, materializes life. This is per- 
plexing. I cannot make out whether dualism is, for M. Bergson, 
merely a provisional starting point or an intractable feature of 
reality. Certainly he has failed to account for matter, just as 
Fichte did. All attempts to explain the genesis of matter are but 
idle and pretentious wordplay. Our conceptions of matter may 
become more dynamic and ethereal ; but, if we think that we are 
deriving it from something immaterial we cheat ourselves with 
empty phrases. 

I do not deny that our richest states of knowing are Intuitive 
Acts, in which we comprehend, in a synoptic insight or vision, 
organized or living wholes of data into which the results of dis- 
cursive thinking have been absorbed. I do reject the wooden 
conception of intelligence which M. Bergson has, and the claim 
that instinct is superior to intelligence. It is true that dogs, birds 



KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 81 

and insects do some things in ways that we do not understand ; but, 
after all, compared to the animals, man's capacity for adaptation 
is indefinitely greater. When M. Bergson speaks of intuition as 
being instinct dilated by intelligence I do not know what he means 
unless it be immediate experience interpreted by reflective thought ; 
if the latter be his meaning it would have been much less mysteri- 
ous to have said so, but it would not have sounded like a mystical 
oracle. 

I pass to a statement of my own theory of the place of knowl- 
edge with reference to experience and reality. 

Knowing is not an affair external to the objects known. It is 
a transaction between a center of feeling, thought and action which 
is an immanent member of the real world and other items in the 
world. Knowing is a function of a conscious organism, in inter- 
play with other dynamic entities, just as walking or eating are. 
An adequate account of what knowledge is cannot be given if one 
begin with the assumption that the individual, as knower, is shut 
up within his own psychical skin and can only get into touch with 
the real world by some sort of mortal leap of self-transcendence. 
Knowledge does not begin with an introspective examination of 
subjective states "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." It 
is only the complete failure of belief and expectation that leads to 
such a condition of mind. Doubt has cognitive value as the 
prelude to gathering oneself together and taking a fresh start at 
grasping the meanings of things. The mind is a function of the 
world. It is a live focus of reality, an organized center in which 
reality comes into active awareness of its own modes of behavior. 
Since the percipient organism is an individuated expression of the 
world's life, the qualities-in-relation that are cognized in perception 
are actual aspects of the real world. 

The relation between the qualities perceived and the mind 
perceiving them is one of immediate and partial identity. Images 
and concepts blend with perception; and images and concepts 
represent or stand for possible immediate experiences; actual 
knowledge is always a fusion, in varying proportions, of immediacy 
and mediacy. To know is to be conscious of, to apprehend in 
meanings, the linkages of things. Awareness is awakened, and 
developed into increasing awareness, by the stresses, the strains and 
conflicts, the urgent problems in the living energies of existence; 
and these stresses or problems of living existence are located. 






82 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

interpreted and resolved through awareness. Truth is the organic 
interdependence of subject and object, and this is always the 
partial consciousness of a dynamic relational whole or complex. 
The real world is a systematic unity of living experients and 
experiences. Each is a function of the other. Eliminate either 
and the other vanishes into the limbo of the unknowable. Knowl- 
edge is that function of the real world operating in thinking organ- 
isms by which the organism becomes aware, in increasing detail 
and extent, of its own qualities and the qualities of its environment 
in their mutual relations — to the end that there may be "more life 
and fuller." * 

Modern epistemology, from Descartes and Locke down through 
Kant to those who maintain to-day the possibility of an inde- 
pendent science of epistemology, has been vitiated by the covert 
"psychologistic" assumption that the business of knowing, all the 
way from perception to the finest-spun speculation, is a purely 
theoretical or contemplative gazing at, or reflecting of, a reality 
different from the knower and set apart from his life. It was 
forgotten that a knower shut up within himself would not only 
cease to know, he would cease to be. Hegel, of course, broke 
through the vicious circle and escaped the artificial maze created by 
the false assumption that the mind is shut off from reality other 
than itself ; but, owing to the persistent influence of Locke, Hume 
and Kant, philosophers have kept on pondering on how to liberate 
the knower from the prison cell of his own subjectivity; by this 
auto-hypnosis, worthy of the Hindu mystic who reaches Nirvana 
by fixation of his gaze on his navel and the repetition of Omi mani 
padme ~hum, they have produced a mass of verbiage and brought 
philosophy into disrepute with the healthy-minded. 

Lately, the biological conception of the constant interplay of 
organism and environment, the pragmatic and behavioristic move- 
ments and the influence of Bergson and the realistic movement, 
have aided in the delivery of philosophy from the impasse of sub- 
jectivism. As Hegel truly saw, thought (in the large sense) and 
reality must be in principle identical, since thought is a bit of 
reality become aware of its relations. This does not mean that the 
individual can excogitate the world out of his private conscious- 
ness ; such an enterprise only reveals the emptiness of his private 
selfhood ; it means that knowledge is attained by the individual's 
submission to the discipline of the factual order. Since the think- 



KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 83 

ing organism is a product of the world, perception and thinking 
are instruments of successful adaptation and enjoyable intercourse 
with the environment. But to assume, as Bergson seems to, that 
since perception and intelligence are instruments of practice, 
therefore they do not reveal the really real, is to betray the influ- 
ence of subjectivism; just, as on the other hand, to narrow the 
scope of knowing to mere overt action, excluding contemplation 
and aesthetic enjoyment, is to take a very parochial view of thought. 

Thought does not come at immediate experience from without. 
It does not descend upon the latter from a rationalist or a priori 
heaven, nor is it born by a mysterious parthenogenesis from a 
virgin experience barren of meaning and relational structure. No 
bit of the crudest experience is wholly devoid of relations. The 
various types of relationship — likeness and difference, identity and 
diversity, spatial and numerical relations of order and magnitude, 
temporal succession and simultaneity, cause and effect, value and 
individuality, the discovery of which is the work of thought — are 
already embedded in the texture of immediate experience. The 
latter is from the outset of its career implicitly relational or orderly 
and significant. If it were not so the foreign importations of 
reflective thinking would not result in coherent and workable 
meanings, honored by the actual course of experience. There 
would be a deadlock between the demands of reflective living and 
the actual world of fact. Thought is the self-adjusting function 
of conscious individuals by which actual experience is ever being 
more fully interpreted, harmonized, and enlarged. Thought shoots 
forth at critical points in the lives of selves as an instrument for 
their development and self-maintenance. 

Thus thought, the interpretative function of personal experi- 
ence, and knowledge its product, do not in principle or character 
transcend experience. The reflective interpretation of experience 
may, and does as matter of fact, often require that thought go 
beyond actual experience in the interest of the latter's rational 
fulfillment or harmony. But this going beyond immediate and 
individuated experience is not a passage into another order of 
being. Our conceptual interpolations and extrapolations must be 
consistent and continuous with the experienced reality if they are 
' to have meaning and efficacy. 

In perceptual knowing the knower is cognitively one with the 
objects of his knowledge, although as practical agent or emotional 



84 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

center lie may have a very different character and existence from 
the objects with which his aims and emotions are connected. We 
do not know perceptual reality through the intervention of a 
tertium quid in the way of sensations and ideas interpolated, and 
constituting a veil hung between our minds and the real objects. 
Parts of reality, namely the perceptual reality of the external 
world, our own felt existence as selves, and the existence of our 
neighbors' bodies, we know directly although but partially ; and in 
thus knowing are in immediate communion with them. Other 
parts of reality, namely conceptual reality or those logical inter- 
polations and completions of empirical reality which constitute 
matters of rational belief about reality we believe to exist because 
of their consistency and continuity with empirical reality. 

For actual experience is a continuum in which the felt existence 
of the self who has the experience is central, a single whole with 
distinctions and relations internal to it. It is always some sort of 
system. It is never, at any stage in the life of the experient and 
in the growth of his field of experience, a chaotic manifold of 
sensations. 13 The central item in the continuum, for the indi- 
vidual experient, is his own body. His own skin is usually the 
most significant boundary line in his experience, for inside it are 
feelings of desire and aversion, restlessness and quiescence, un- 
easiness and satisfaction, pleasure and pain. Through the double- 
ness of the sensory experiences of his body and the constant union 
of these double sense data with affections or feelings, his own body, 
and later his psychical selfhood, is cut out from the rest of the 
world. It is in terms of behavior or interaction between his own 
body, and other bodies, animate and inanvmate, that the growing 
individual learns to discriminate between himself and all othe 
things, between living and nonliving bodies, and betvjeen pern 
or conscious, thinking and willing beings, and things that are no 
persons. In early thought we do not find the distinction clearly 
drawn between the animate and the inanimate, or between persons 
and animate beings that are not persons. Even to-day it is diffi- 
cult for the dog lover not to attribute the rudiments of personality 
to his dog. 

It is not my purpose here to repeat the work of genetic psychol- 

" Kant 's conception of the chaotic manifold of sense, an inheritance from 
Hume's atomistic impressions, is an epistemological myth. In this respect 
is a truer concept of crude experience. 






KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 85 

ogy in tracing the differentiation, within the continuum of the 
individual's experience, into self, other selves, and not-selves. 14 It 
is clear that the distinctions between these entities have developed 
together, and pari passu. The individual can have a clear con- 
sciousness of living beings only in so far as at the same time he 
has a clear consciousness of nonliving beings. He gains a vivid 
sense of the meanings of selfhood and personality in himself only 
through the give and take of social intercourse ; that is, in so far 
as he recognizes other selves and persons, and interprets himself 
to himself in terms of their behavior, and themselves to himself in 
terms of his own feelings and meanings of which he knows directly. 

The objective world of the developed mind is a socialized recon- 
struction of the continuum of primitive experience; a differen- 
tiating, that is, a contrasting and relating of physical things, other 
selves and myself in interaction, interpassion and thus in inter- 
communion. 

The theory that I make my world by projecting or ejecting my 
sensations or ideas out from my head is an epistemological myth. 
As James Ward says, if this were true then everything would go 
into my head including the head itself. Avenarius says that the 
theory of ideas as immediate data existing in heads (which is the 
basis of the copy theory of knowledge) is due to man's attempt to 
picture to himself how things were present to another self. 15 I 
have no difficulty in knowing how things of sense are present to 
me — they are present in their immediate realness though but par- 
tially so. But the other fellow's soul or mind is not one of my 
sense data. In terms of the primitive soul theory, I may think of 
his head as containing ideas or images, just like the ideas or images 
that I have (in dreaming or reverie) of things not present to sense. 
The assumption is that the thing as he sees it is an image which is 
part of a series of images which constitute the furniture of his 
soul, but which he projects or ejects out into circumambient space. 
But the truth is that his experience is a continuum of interacting 
and intersuffering factors, a mode of organic behavior to which his 

"See, especially, Wm. James, Psychology, Vol. I, Chap. 10; and J. M. 
Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development. 

16 1 think Avenarius' explanation is insufficient. I have the same problem 
in connection with my own images of past events or objects not now present 
to sense. In the latter cases I assume that my "ideas" or ' 'images" are 
mental copies of the reality. One does not need to consider how the othei 
man knows to be led to the hypothesis that ideas are copies of things. 



86 MAN AND THE COSMOS 






own body, is central, just as mine is. His world is immediately 
present to him, as mine is to me ; because the relationships between 
our bodies and the other elements of our world are organic and 
dynamical, and the center of each man's world is the felt locus of 
the suffering and enjoyment of the subject or ego himself. Grad- 
ually there arises the distinction — still within the whole continuum 
of experience — between the psychical centers of energy and 
resistance, of feeling, purposive striving, meaning-seeking and 
finding (and to seek a meaning is to seek satisfaction of an interest 
or feeling just as much as to seek a meal is) ; the physical centers 
or clusters of energy ; and, as the intermediating link, the physio- 
logical acts and sufferings through which the psychical and the 
physical worlds have intercourse. The distinction is always made 
in terms of behavior. A sense quality is a mode of behavior ; just 
as a self's feeling of pleasure, pain, striving, averting, meaning, 
thinking, are modes of behavior. The continuum of the individual 
organism's experience is, at all stages of its differentiation and 
integration, a system of interacting centers of energy. The in- 
animate thing, the living body, the soul or person, is that which 
energizes in the unique way which is known as its qualities, or 
ways of behaving vn relation to the various other Jcmds of behaving 
complexes. The object hitting, pushing, resisting, meeting or fol- 
lowing another — these are comparatively simple ways in which 
complexes of qualities act and suffer. An object, feeling, observ- 
ing, thinking, striving in relation to other like or different objects, 
is a comparatively complex mode of behavior, which we call a 
self. 

But, thus far, we have not taken full account of the fact that 
each individual has his own continuum of experience, his own 
world. Are not all these private worlds ? Is not each individual, 
as experiencing and energizing center, a windowless monad ? No ! 
for he cannot experience without energizing and he cannot energize 
without experiencing other beings. "Private" implies "public." 
The only private thing in my world is my body, and even that is 
not wholly private. You do not experience my feelings, but you 
experience parts of my body as a part of your world. Your 
physical world and mine are not wholly identical, for the reason 
that you experience the space-whole and the temporal and dynam- 
ical sequence from your unique position and the series of unique 
moments in your history, and I from mine, likewise. But our 



I 



KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 87 

worlds are not shut off from one another. If they were we could 
never recognize each other, communicate or cooperate. Physical 
reality is the system of moving complexes of qualities, continuous 
with each experience, that we must each take account of in the 
satisfaction of his interests. But, in dealing with physical things, 
and in satisfying our interests, we must often, to an even greater 
degree, take account of social reality — of other selves. The 
physical world is the spatial and temporal continuum in which we 
meet, act and suffer; that is, our individual experiences are be- 
lieved to be similar aspects of the same continuum. The physical 
order, in short, is real not for me by myself but for me as a mem- 
ber of society. I know myself as a self only by contrast, conflict, 
partial agreement and cooperation, with other selves. I know my 
own body only in distinction from and interrelation with other 
bodies. But, of these other bodies, some are more like my own in 
ways of behaving than they are different from it. I am compelled 
to conclude that the latter type of body is associated with a sentient 
self. I could not know my bodily self as such except by contrast, 
comparison and interrelation with other bodies; but I could not 
recognize myself as psychical self except by recognizing other 
psychical selves. These exist infer entially for me through my 
experience of the behavior of certain bodies. To sum up, it is 
impossible that I should know myself, even in my utmost degrees 
of privacy, without knowing both another self and a public not-self. 
It is impossible that I should know a public, physical realm with- 
out recognizing other selves. It is impossible that I should recog- 
nize these selves without admitting the existence of bodies that 
are not my mere subjective states, and not the subjective states 
of some other self. 

To sum up, knowledge of myself,. of other selves and of a com- 
mon physical world in which we meet, fight, cooperate, ignore, or 
love one another, and with which we strive or drift, are differen- 
tiations in the continuum of primitive experience which develop 
together and interdependently. The common or physical aspects 
of experience are socially accessible objects, but society is equally 
a property of the physical world. Thus self, other-self and 
physical nature are distinctions or differentiations within the 
objective continuum of experience ; which is seen, through 
reflective analysis and synthesis, to be a system of interacting 
centers of energy, some of which feel the interactions and thus are 



88 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

feeling centers sufficiently alike to be recognized as having an 
identical nature. 

The self and the other self have each his own experience ; but 
each knows himself in relation to the other ; and the physical world 
is primarily the enduring though changing ground of the com- 
munity of intercourse and experience between selves; the other 
ground is the community of nature in the different selves. Every 
self is a unique or private center of feeling ; but a common world 
is recognized because selves recognize that they not only perceive 
but feel and act similarly. Feeling is the significance of experi- 
ence for a sentient organism. 

Is not an immediate acquaintance with other selves just as 
necessary an assumption to account for knowledge as an immediate 
acquaintance with some aspects of things physical ? Yes : but in 
neither case does the immediacy of acquaintance exclude mediacy 
in the logical sense. The physical thing, which seems to be a 
wholly immediate and present object in sense-perception, is a 
blending of actual sensory experiences with memories and inter- 
pretations. It is, in large part, a construction of thought. This 
construction arises through the fusion of qualities present to 
sense with memory-images controlled by interest and association 
and with intellectual interpretation controlled by interest. 

Just so with our knowledge of other selves. The basis of my 
instantaneous recognition of another self is a specific complex of 
immediate sense-qualities interwoven with relevant, and some- 
times too with accidentally, associated parts of my past experiences 
of similar complexes, and previous interpretations thereof ; it may 
involve too a novel constructive interpretation, a discovery of some 
qualities that I had not previously associated with a self. I am 
instantly aware of the other self ; but that awareness is a blend o 
qualities present to sense with purposive interpretation, motivate 
by my present affections, interests, and aims. 

Another self is for me a being like myself of which I must take 
account in the fulfillment of my own interests. It evinces by its 
sensed behavior, as interpreted by me, purposes that are like my 
actual purposes or like other purposes that I might have under 
other conditions ; purposes that may cooperate or conflict with my 
own deepest interests. I perceive the activities of that complex 
of qualities which I call another self, and I read interests and 
purposes into those activities. I believe that being to be a self. 



n 



KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 89 

because it shows features of behavior analogous to my own be- 
havior, actual or possible ; which follow hard upon by feelings, in- 
terests, aims. It displays intelligent adaptiveness, varied signs of 
individuality, even unto dangerous passion. Therefore I say it is 
an individual which feels and thinks. I cannot help believing so. 
The deepest concords and the most heart-quaking conflicts in our 
affectional and purposive lives are engendered by the reinforce- 
ment and thwarting of our interests by other centers of action and 
resistance in the environment. Therefore our deepest instinct is 
to believe that these are selves like unto ourselves. I can only 
recognize the presence in another self of that which corresponds to 
feelings and purposes that I have, or remember that I have had, 
or imagine that I might have. On the other hand, my own indi- 
vidual and purposive life is constantly being quickened in feeling 
and thought, and stirred to action, by the cross-currents of experi- 
ence which play between my self and other selves. 

How does the distinction between the physical and the 
psychical arise? How does man come to think of an inner self 
at all ? The first distinction made is between one's own body and 
other bodies. Because of the doubleness of sensory experience 
when one part of the organism is in contact with another part of 
the same organism, as contrasted with the singleness of sensory 
experience when the organism is in contact with an external body, 
the percipient's own organism is marked off from all other bodies. 
The first division in experience is thus between the bodily self and 
the world of not-self. The distinction between the bodily self or 
organism and the psychical self is a comparatively late product of 
human reflection. In Greek thought, for example, one does not 
find it made . sharply before Plato. And even then the soul is 
identified with the natural life-principle, as it is in Hebrew 
thought until shortly before the advent of Jesus. In New Testa- 
ment thought the distinction is made between the body, the soul 
or natural principle of sentient life, and the spirit or moral per- 
sonality. In primitive thought generally the soul is the "double" 
of the body, a finer and more subtle material facsimile of the body, 
which it can leave and reenter ; the soul is a shadow, a mannikin 
or image of the bodily self, a bird ; especially it is breath (nephesh, 
ruah, anima, spiritus, psyche, thwmos, pneuma). There seems 
to be no doubt that the belief in the dual nature of the self arose 
from a consideration of the phenomena of memory-images in 



90 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

intimate association with pleasurable and painful feelings. 
Dreams of terror and delight, day visions and hallucinations with 
strong affective coloring, and so forth — in such states men saw the 
forms of the living and the dead, of relatives and strangers, of 
friends and enemies. Thus the flux of the conscious life appears 
more intimate and variable, freer of the limitations of time and 
space, than the stubborn and fairly stable flow of the external 
physical processes. Man's ordinary waking memory-images, too, 
were recognized as largely independent of the external world in 
their goings and comings. The realm of these relatively inde- 
pendent and controllable images and the associated affections 
becomes the soul or psychical self. The development of reason 
and conscious self-control brings about a belief in the nonmaterial 
or spiritual character of the soul. The subject's own body is then 
conceived to be intermediate, in its responsiveness to feeling and 
purpose, between the inner purposive procession of images and 
affections and the more stubborn external world. The psychical 
self is regarded as the inner pulse or continuously felt process 
which is dominated by affections, ideas, interests and which can 
feel itself as such. 

The self-awareness of the qualitatively unique character of the 
inner flux is the condition of full self-consciousness. And, the 
emergence of reflective consciousness or self-consciousness is a 
unique event, the expression of a unique principle. The distinc- 
tion between the realm of images and the realm of external bodily 
perceptions is a stage on the road to the discovery of selfhood. 
Intercourse with other selves stimulates the discovery of self. But 
these conditions do not account for the manufacture of a self out 
of purely physical materials. Only the reality of selfhood accounts 
fully for the belief in one's self and other selves. 

The validity of knowledge cannot be accounted for on any othe] 
presuppositions than these: (1) that the mind knows som* 
features of realities immediately; and (2) that some of th( 
known realities exist independently of the individual's acts oJ 
partially knowing them. One must reject the argument that, 
since immediate actuality is matter of conscious experience, there- 
fore one can have no knowledge of anything but facts that exist 
in some consciousness. If, on the one hand, the specific nature 
of the experient is implicated in the character of the experienced 
object, on the other hand it is an assumption without warrant to 



KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 91 

say that the nature of the experienced object must be always dis- 
torted by becoming object of experience. Consciousness may be 
sometimes pellucid. 

The variations in sensory experiences among different ob- 
servers, in regard to what is believed to be the same object, and 
the variations in the same observer's experiences of what he 
believes to be the same object, in different times and situations 
and through the avenues of different senses, render absurd the as- 
sumption that all percepts of the same object are identical in qual- 
ity or existence. It is an old story in philosophy that the varia- 
tions and conflicts among sense perceptions, together with the fact 
of sensory illusions, require the separation of perception, as ap- 
pearance, from the real objects. If the being of things consisted 
wholly in being perceived, there would be as many distinct things 
as there are differing percepts for all actual percipients. Every 
individual would have a world of his own. At every successive 
moment in the individual's sensory experiences there would be 
a ceaseless succession, an endless number, of differing worlds. 
If the table is just what I perceive now and nothing more, then 
probably precisely the same table does not exist in any two suc- 
cessive perceptions of mine, and the number of successive tables 
must be in proportion to the number of observers multiplied into 
the number of their percepts. There are as many things as there 
are distinct percepts. Things are annihilated and created anew 
every moment. 16 What then is the one really "real" table ? If it 
be a wholly unknown entity, we are impotent to define its relation 
to our perceptual tables, and there is no sense in calling it a table. 
It might just as well be called the "real" polar bear. The absolute 
idealist tells us that the "real" table is the content of an all- 
knower's all-inclusive experience. Perhaps it is! Who knows? 
But since we are given no information as to the relation between 
the multitude of perceptual tables and the absolute's table, we are 
no better off than we were when we started. Since the absolute 
includes everything, we hnow not how, it explains nothing. We 
need a more modest principle for knowledge — one that does not 
treat us with high disdain and that we can use in the day's work. 

Any part of the empirical environment, of which a self must 
take account in order to know and to act, is a real object. And 

\ " 

18 Hume. 



92 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the same principle holds good for the individual self's own nature 
or character. Any part of its inner or privately experienced 
nature of which the self must take account in order to carry out a 
purpose, to satisfy an interest, is real. For example, the young 
man, setting forth upon the career of a scholar, must take account 
of the fact that he cannot help falling in love. He may find that 
this fact and its consequences are "harder" facts than the table. 
Keality for us is what we must take into account in our thinking 
and acting, and for the satisfaction of our interests. 

To come back to the table, the "real" table is a logical con- 
struction, an entity or thing necessarily conceived as the active 
center or bearer of manifold possible qualities which, in perception 
and action, I cannot avoid recognizing. If one say that the table 
is simply inert, that it resists and sustains certain of my activities, 
I remind him that inertia or resistance means activity counter to 
another being's activity (John Locke suggested that the essence of 
matter is passive power, but he failed to observe that passive power 
is a concept relative to another's activities). The self, both as 
knower and agent, is a member of a complex dynamic environment, 
the active and passive relationships of whose elements are subject 
to continuous change. Differing perceptions are held to refer to 
what is existentially the same object, provided there be sufficierc 
continuity and coherence in the experienced qualities and their 
groupings for selves to act on and suffer or perceive the object in 
a manner that is continuous and coherent. So long as I and other 
selves can carry out similar purposes and get what we agree, in 
terms of our conventional linguistic symbols and pictures, to be 
continuously similar perceptual reactions we believe that we are 
dealing with the same table. In brief, if I am alone, the table is 
the same object for me so long as I can do similar things with it 
and suffer similar things from it. If you are with me and we 
agree, through our media of communication, the table is for both 
of us the same. If we disagree completely then either you are 
crazy or I am, and some other selves must settle the matter. 

Sameness of objects is a socially useful convention ; a standard- 
ized object is the "real" object. Thus, in order that it be real in an 
intelligible sense, an object does not need to remain absolutely the 
same through a lapse of time, or to observers in different situations 
and conditions. It is enough if there be recognizable and intelli- 
gible continuity and coherence in the qualities and relations 



KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 93 

experienced and logically inferred from the experiences. A real 
object is definable as anything which exercises constraint upon us 
in our perception, thinking, and willing; and which, in this 
capacity has some degree of continuity, empirical coherence, and 
social cognizability. Reality as a whole is a vastly complex system 
of active centers of qualities in relations of which at any time and 
under any circumstances, we perceive, act on, or are conscious of 
being acted upon by, only a fragment. 

The objects of perception then do not exist, just as they are 
at any moment perceived, apart from the act of perception. No 
finite object is self-complete. No perception by a finite subject 
can be self-complete. Relations are as real as qualities. But, as 
partial apprehensions of the actual qualities of the object in some 
of its relations to the knower and to other qualities of the environ- 
ment, perceptions are thus far valid. The perceptual object is a 
true aspect of the real object in dynamic relation to a percipient. 

There is empirical continuity between objects immediately 
perceived and others related to them in the context of reality. 
There is symbolical continuity between representative images and 
concepts of objects and these objects as immediately sensed; and 
there is logical continuity between objects experienced and other 
objects whose existence is implied in actual experience, but which 
are not now and may never be objects of any finite self's experi- 
ence. For example, if the electron, as defined in the electronic 
theory of matter, is the assumption in regard to the ultimate con- 
stitution of matter which best agrees with all the facts of imme- 
diate experience and with all the other generalizations and 
inferences intermediate between the perceptual facts and the con- 
ceptual nature of electrons, then the belief in electrons is the 
valid belief in regard to the ultimate constitution of matter. If 
the belief in the existence of electrons is not the only theory of 
the constitution of matter which is a logically coherent consequence 
of the empirical character of physical things, then the existence of 
electrons remains hypothetical. By contrast, the existence of the 
earth's interior or of the other side of the moon is not hypothetical 
in this sense. No other belief is consistent with the facts. 

Naive realism errs in assuming the complete identity of the 
particular object with the content of a single perception, and in 
believing that particular objects are cognized as such in isolation 
from other objects and without consideration of the percipient's 



94 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

own individual situation and constitution. In truth we never 
know a merely isolated particular object. Knowledge of anything, 
however vague and rudimentary, is apprehension of a specific 
datum in a relational complex. Social realism, the position of the 
writer, admits the distinction between the object as logical con- 
struct, that is as rational and public ground for the varying per- 
ceptions which refer to it, and the percepts as series of aspects of 
the object; and holds to the reality of nonexperienced entities as 
logically implied in the continuity and coherence of experience. 
It holds that valid knowledge is always in some degree a matter 
of the determination of the given or datum of sense in and through 
its position and connections in a relational complex. It insists on 
the logical structure of reality as a system of meaningful elements 
in a totality. 

APPENDIX 

THE NEW CRITICAL REALISM 

Since I have called the doctrine of knowledge expounded in this 
work "Critical Kealism" it is in order to state briefly wherein it differs 
from the ingenious and original doctrine advocated in the volume 
Critical Realism by Durant Drake and others. There are several 
important differences between the standpoints of the several contribu- 
tors to that volume. I have not space to expound or examine these 
differences. 17 I shall limit my treatment to a brief discussion of the 
most characteristic features of the doctrine, especially as expounded 
by Professors Drake, Santayana and Strong. All the writers seem 
to be agreed in distinguishing three factors in knowledge: (1) the 
mental or psychical state; (2) the meaning, intent, "character-com- 
plex" or "essence/ 5 which is the datum or "given"; (3) the real 
object which is not given, but affirmed as the existent which the 
datum or essence means, and in genuine knowledge means correctly. 
The most original feature of the general doctrine is that the datum 
or essence is always a universal, a what, without locus in space or 
date in time. The mental state has temporal date and the object 
in perception is in space, since an existent must always have a tem- 
poral, and may also have a spatial locus. Messrs. Drake, Kogers, 
Santayana and Strong deny that the datum is a mental complex, 
whereas Messrs. Love joy, Pratt and Sellars affirm that the datum is 



17 See the careful review of the work by Professor E. B. Perry in The 
Philosophical Beview, Vol. xxx, pp. 393-409. 






KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 95 

the "character" of the mental state of the moment; thus for the 
latter the datum is the "essence" both of the object known through it 
and also of the mental state which is the "vehicle" of the knowledge. I 
am unable, on grounds given elsewhere, to admit the reality of essences 
which have neither mental nor physical existence. An essence or 
universal is either a concept existing in and for a mind or it is a 
physical relation; it may be both, as when one has a correct concept 
of a physical relation or "law"; it may be mental in two senses, as 
when a mind entertains a concept of value or purpose which actually 
functions in minds. An essence which is neither an existing thought 
nor a physical law seems to me to have no real being, either in the 
heavens above, the earth beneath or the waters under the earth. It 
does not even "subsist" since there is nothing on which it can subsist, 
unless one invoke a Platonic realm of ideas (in the traditional sense 
as eternal existents). 

If the datum is the "character" of the mental state in knowing 
then the latter is identical with the existent known, and what is 
known is a mental state; we are not delivered from mentalism. 
Surely a character has no existence except as the character of some 
thing. Either the object known is mental or physical or a neutral 
entity. I have never, to the best of my knowledge and belief, met 
a neutral entity. Consequently I do not know what such an one 
may be, except that it cannot be like any thing that I have ever 
known. 

Furthermore, I am unable to understand how a universal "es- 
sence," devoid of place or date, gets attached to an unperceived object 
in such fashion that through it the latter is identified as owning the 
universal in particularized form, here and now or there and then. If 
the essence be a universal which does not exist and the particular 
object which owns it (or, perhaps, is owned by it) is not in any 
respect immediately perceived, how is the connection effected between 
them? 

In the case of my knowledge of past events, or of objects not pres- 
ent to sense but believed to exist now, I distinguish between the mental 
state which is a momentary existent and the object which the mental 
state means or refers to indirectly; but my affirmation of the occur- 
rence of past events or of the contemporaneous existence of objects 
not perceived is an inference from memory, record and testimony. 
In all such cases knowledge is clearly inferential or indirect; and 
the mental state of knowing is representative of objects not given; 
what is given is the feeling of familiarity with the recognition of 
nonpresence to perception which marks the memory state, or belief 
in the trustworthiness of record or testimony. The critical realist 



96 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

doctrine transforms the mental attitude of memory or interpretation 
of credible record and testimony into "essence." He inserts the 
belief-attitude as a tertium quid between the mental state and the 
object not present. In the case of perception I am so naive as to be 
unable to find the three factors which the new critical realists find. 
I find a consciousness of my mental attitude or act of attention and 
the group or "congeries" of sensed qualities which is, for me, the 
object. These qualities are not essences or universals or character- 
complexes having no locus in space and time. They are particular 
or determinate, here-and-now existences. They occupy a given spatial 
contour at this moment. I am aware, on reflecting, that I do not 
immediately perceive all the qualities which I attribute to the object, 
but I know too that I would not attribute any of the qualities to the 
object if I were not in the immediate presence of some qualities of 
sense. I cannot help regarding these qualities as having a non- 
mental existence. My desk, I say, is green. But my friend says that 
he sees it gray. What is its real color? I answer that to him it is 
gray and to me green, because of the differences in the structures 
of our respective visual apparatuses, and these differences are con- 
stituent parts of the real world. My friend and I do not see the desk 
as having the same color, but we do perceive it as having the same 
identical place, contour and texture. If we disagreed in regard to 
all these items we would not see the same desk in any sense, and we 
could not even disagree in regard to its appearance. There must be 
a minimum of agreement in order that there may be disagreement. 
For common sense the real desk is the desk as it appears to the 
normal percipient under normal, that is, usual conditions. It is 
the community of perceptual qualities and reactions that constitutes 
the practical test of realness. The objective world of common sense 
is the socially accepted series of aspects or appearances of the physical 
order to normal percipients. In one sense whatever anybody per- 
ceives in an object is real — namely in the presence of that individual 
percipient with the sensory and mental equipment and history that 
is his. There is no other standard that is final, when dispute arises, 
than the agreement or community established through communica- 
tion of opinion and similarity of reaction to the object. The doctrine 
of essences, given but not existing, distinct from but affirmed of the 
object seems to me a superfluous fiction. 

What then is the object in the absence of any percipient? It is 
the group of qualities or activities which in the presence of percipients 
give rise to the perceived qualities. I understand by the physical in 
itself just that complex of motions of physical entities which are in- 
ferred by science to exist as the nonmental conditions of there being 



KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY 97 

percepts. In this sense our bodies are parts of the physical order. 
What these entities are science is continually trying to determine. It 
is a scientific question. Philosophy is concerned with it chiefly when 
the physicist turns metaphysician a ouirance and asserts that there 
are no percipient minds and that the physical conditions of percep- 
tion explain away the percipient. 

Epistemological idealism or mentalism, a better term since ideal- 
ism also means the doctrine or belief that the universe is controlled 
by ethical or spiritual values, a doctrine which, as will appear later, 
has no logical connection with mentalism or even with pan-psychism, 
has been subjected to many criticisms in recent philosophical litera- 
ture. I single out for reference — G. E. Moore, "Refutation of Ideal- 
ism/' Mind, N. S. 1903, Vol. xii, pp. 433-453 ; the cooperative volume, 
The New Realism, especially the essay by K. B. Perry, "A Eealistic 
Theory of Independence/' and the volume by Perry, Present Philo- 
sophical Tendencies; finally, the most thoroughgoing critical exami- 
nation that I know is Oswald Kuelpe's Die Realisierung ; Volume I. 
Volume II of the latter has just appeared. It is unnecessary here 
to review all the criticisms. I shall have occasion to make further 
criticisms of various aspects of mentalism in connection with other 
problems. Among the attempts at metaphysical realism may be 
mentioned ; The New Realism, The New Rationalism by E. G. Spauld- 
ing, A Study in Realism by John Laird, and especially the monu- 
mental work of S. Alexander, Space, Time and Deity. The present 
writer has reviewed the latter work in The Philosophical Review, 
Vol. xxx, pp. 282-297. 



CHAPTEK VI 



APPEARANCE AND KEAEITY 



The only materials that we have for the construction of a 
theory of reality are actual experiences plus the funded meanings 
of previous experiences. Experiential reality is a duality-in-unity, 
consisting of subjects and objects of experience. And the feeling, 
thinking and willing of the subject are just as truly matter of experi- 
ence as is sense perception. Thus to attempt to construct a theory 
of reality and to leave the subject out of consideration is like 
attempting to produce the play of Hamlet with the Prince of 
Denmark left out. The whole business of metaphysics is just to 
determine in outline what must be the general character of a 
coherent world order as implied in the meanings of actual experi- 
ence. The total concept of reality must include features that go 
beyond actual experience, but that are implied in the latter as 
principles for interpreting and completing it. 

Actual experience is very complex. It includes things and 
events in space-time relations, and the subject's own feelings, 
thoughts, valuations, purposes and efforts. The feelings, thoughts, 
valuations and purposes of the individual subject are not imme- 
diately accessible to direct observation by other subjects ; therefore 
they are called "subjective," but they are indirectly known through 
the behavior of their subjects. Objects experienced in space-time 
relations are held to be public or common objects perceivable by 
other knowers, and are therefore called physical objects. Experi- 
ence is always in process. Subjective states — feelings, images, 
judgments, valuations and purposes — change; so do the objects of 
public or physical experience. Thus the consideration of all 
objects of experience involves temporal relations. It is not so 
obvious that all objects of private and individual experience in- 
volve spatial relations, although I think that ultimately they do. 
But the discussion of the latter question may be conveniently post- 
poned to a later stage in our inquiry. The distinction between 







APPEARANCE AND REALITY 99 

physical objects and psychical objects is thus equivalent to the 
distinction between things perceived as having publicly accessible 
sensory qualities; and desires, enjoyments, sufferings, images, 
concepts, valuations and purposes, as contemplated and appre- 
ciated or willed by the individual self. The minimal meaning of 
a self is that it is a center of feeling, thought and volition, which 
can be aware that it feels, thinks, values, and wills. 1 

How we come to make the distinction between psychical sub- 
jects or selves and physical objects has been discussed in the 
previous chapter. We saw there the consciousness of being a self 
or subject of experience arises through a gradual process of dif- 
ferentiation between mental and physical objects and that this 
process takes place in social intercourse with other selves as well 
as in the individual's direct dealings with nature. The distinction 
between the mental and physical is built up through the demands 
made, and the responses received, in human intercourse with other 
selves and nature. The physical world becomes recognized as the 
common and more or less constant medium of human intercourse. 
Self, other self and a common world in which self meets its other 
and enjoys with and suffers from the other, are the irreducible 
elements in man's construction of a universe. Of course, if an 
individual insists that his ego is the cosmos one may not be able 
to convince him that he is wrong, but one may properly point 
out that to thus insist on the identity of his ego with the cosmos 
is to perpetrate at once a tautology and a contradiction. For in 
making the assertion he is assuming another ego to make it to, 
whereas the assertion itself denies the existence of another ego. 
If he persists in his insistence probably he will finally arrive either 
in the mad house or in prison. 

The development of experience is triadic. The increase in 
content and organization of the individual's experience is, in one 
aspect, the integration of his personality, in wealth and harmony 
of content and action; in a second aspect, the corresponding in- 



1 One of the principal motives for the behavioristic standpoint in psy- 
chology is undoubtedly the desire to get rid of the elusiveness and privacy 
of subjectivity, and thus to make psychology an objective science, using the 
common physical methods of observation, experiment and measurement that 
are employed in the physical sciences. Whether in so doing extreme behavior- 
ism in psychology does not throw out the baby with the bath we need not 
here consider. This matter will be discussed more fully in Book iv, " Per- 
sonality.' ' 



100 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

tegration of his social relationships; and, in a third aspect, the 
integration of the common or physical world. I shall now con- 
sider the grounds on which a sharp contrast is set up between 
appearance and reality. 

If all actual experiences are real what is the place of erroneous 
experiences and beliefs — of illusions, hallucinations and all the 
errors in regard to fact and theory that one finds in life and his- 
tory % If experiences are real does it not follow that the sun movec 
around the earth until the Copernicans persuaded some Europeans 
to believe the contrary in spite of appearances, that the earth 
and living species were created in six days until evolutionists 
succeeded in persuading some people to the contrary belief ? That 
things are not really as they seem, that experience is an inconstant, 
inconsistent and deceptive flux ; and that the real reality must be 
some sort of ever-abiding, harmonious and perfect order or being 
behind or beyond experience — this is a discovery which seems to 
be the very threshold of wisdom. The contrast between the muddy, 
tortuous and treacherous stream of experience and the clearness, 
fixity, perfect orderliness and reliability of the true reality has 
been a main motive in the history of thought from the Vedanta 
philosophy of India and the philosophy of Parmenides, the Greek, 
down to the present time. All the higher religions assume the 
ultimate reality of One in whom is neither variableness nor shadow 
of turning. Even those philosophers to-day who, like Mr. F. H. 
Bradley and his school, insist that the ultimate reality must be a 
perfect experience, argue that all the experiences and beliefs of 
the human self are untrustworthy appearances because incon- 
sistent, incomplete and in flux. Physical things and their quali- 
ties, space and time, motion and change, causation, purposive 
activity, and even the self, goodness and truth, are self-contra- 
dictory appearances. No one of these things can stand on its own 
feet ; every one is transitory, forever seeking to be what it is not 
and what it cannot become without passing beyond itself and being 
transmuted into something other than it is. Every one of these 
aspects of finite experience and belief, from an orange and its 
qualities to a self in moral volition and truth seeking, means to 
be what it is not and never is what it means to be. No truth is 
wholly true, except the truth that no truth is wholly true. Every- 
thing in our experience, every category of ordinary thinking, every 
practical idea, runs out endlessly, when we examine it analytically, 



APPEARANCE AND REALITY 101 

into its opposite or other. We can neither think a sensuous thing 
as the unity of its qualities nor as different from its qualities. 
Motion and change are inconsistent because there must be some- 
thing which moves or changes, but if there is then it cannot change 
or move without ceasing to be itself. We cannot think causality 
or activity without at once asserting that causes and effects 
both are and are not continuous. Space and time must be 
affirmed to be at once endlessly divisible and extensible and to 
involve absolute bounds, beginnings and endings. The self is ever 
fluctuating, the boundaries between self and not-self are ever shift- 
ing, and the self is thus forever dependent on the not-self. Ideas 
and ideals refer to a reality other than themselves and if they were 
identical with it they would cease to be ideas and ideals. The 
absolute reality must be a perfect individual whole, eternal, utterly 
harmonious with itself, the perfect union, in one seamless whole, 
of meaning and existence, a coherent and stable organization in 
which all that is finite and transitory is absorbed and transmuted. 
It must be beyond all the experiences that human beings have and 
yet be a perfect experience. It must be beyond all the truth that 
human beings can find, all the good that they can will and aspire 
to, all the beauty that they can create or imagine. All human 
experience, all human vision of truth, beauty and goodness, must 
pass into the eternal perfection of a changelessly complete experi- 
ence. 2 Each of the appearances, if considered as a whole in itself, 
is more or less contradictory. Reality is a perfect, systematic 
whole, an eternally harmonious individual. On the other hand 
reality is present in all the appearances. "Reality, then, being a 
systematic whole, can have no being apart from its appearance, 
though neither of them taken singly, nor yet the sum of them 
thought collectively, can exhaust its contents." 3 "And though no 
appearance is the whole of reality, in none of them all does the 
whole of reality fail to manifest itself as a whole. The whole is 
i truly, as a whole, present in each and every part, while yet no 
is part is the whole." 4 The appearances differ in degrees of sys- 
: tematic unity, or individuality, and the degree of individuality 

1 The best brief statement of the arguments for the above view is per- 
haps that of Mr. A. E. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, Book ii, Chaps. 1-3. 
|j The whole of Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality is a brilliant piece of 
argumentation for the same doctrine. 

1 Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, p. 106. 
* Ibid, p. 106. 



102 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

which any appearance possesses is the measure of its degree of 
reality; that is, of the degree in which it manifests or expresses 
the character of the whole. The whole, as perfect system, or har- 
monious individuality, is present in every part but not equally so. 
For example, a constellation of electrons, a sentient organism, and 
a well-organized human mind freighted with thoughtful experience 
and insight, all have some degree of systematic unity, hut the 
human mind in question has a much higher degree of individuality 
than the constellation of electrons ; and therefore is a much more 
adequate manifestation of reality, that is, has a much higher degree 
of reality. But all appearances, from the least to the greatest, are 
necessary to the perfection of the whole. a In the sense that it is 
the same single experience system which appears as a whole and in 
its whole nature in every one of the subordinate experience- 
systems, they are all alike real, and each is as indispensable as 
every other to the existence of the whole. In the sense that the 
whole is more exclusively present in one than in another, there is 
an infinity of possible degrees of reality and unreality." 5 

And the degree of individuality, and therefore, the degree of 
reality, which any appearance has, depends: (1) on its richness 
of contents or its comprehensiveness; (2) on its degree of internal 
unity or harmony. These two features of individuality or reality 
are complementary. It follows that we are nearer the final truth 
in regard to the nature of the perfect individual whole of reality 
when we think of it as an organism than when we think of it as a 
mechanical aggregate, and still nearer the final truth when we 
think of it as a mind than when we think of it as an organism. 
And, if a society be a more comprehensive and better organized 
individual whole than a mind, then we would be nearest the final 
truth about reality in thinking of it as a perfect society. On the 
other hand, from the standpoint of what we may call Bradleyan 
idealism the perfect reality could not be a society for the simple 
reason that a society, as such, has not and is not a single experience. 

I shall now examine critically Mr. Bradley's doctrine. It is 
obvious, without a prolonged dialectic, that if any finite thing be 
set up as isolated or self-complete, it becomes self-contradictory. 
Anything finite is real only in relation to others. Everything 
finite is involved in a complex network of relationships. My pen- 

6 ma., p. 109. 



APPEARANCE AND REALITY 103 

cil, for instance, is a complex of sense qualities — cylindrical shape, 
yellow color, woody texture, specific density, diameter, length, and 
spatial position. Every one of these qualities, and therefore all of 
them taken together, involve series of relations to other qualities, 
from which they differ and which they resemble in various degrees 
of kind, extensive and intensive quantity, cohesiveness, density 
and duration. My pencil, also, originates and passes away in 
ideological and social series of relations. It is quite true that if 
we set up space, time, causation, activity, purpose, or even the 
self, yes, even truth or goodness, as abstractions existing in and 
for themselves, we become involved in self-contradictory state- 
ments. The human self is complex, changing, in part dependent 
on its own body, on other selves, and on physical bodies for what 
it is and becomes. It is equally true that truth is relational in 
two senses : (1) it is the relation between a knower and the objects 
of his knowing; (2) no single object of knowledge is known or 
knowable in isolation. Goodness is relational in two senses: (1) it 
is the relation between a human value as willed and the objective 
conditions of successful volition (the actual nature of the agent is 
a part of the objective conditions) ; (2) no single willed or 
accepted value exists in isolation. Certainly, then, the ultimately 
real is the whole, and the whole must be some sort of system. 
Whether it is one timelessly perfect individual or harmonious 
experience will be discussed later. Suffice it to say now that I do 
not so regard the totality of the real, for I cannot form any clear 
and consistent conception of reality as one absolute super-rela- 
tional, nontemporal harmony of experience not owned by any self ; 
and if there be a perfect self it must exist in relation to other 
selves ; therefore it cannot be the totality of the real. Reality at its 
highest level may be a society of selves, but it cannot be one self. 
Everything real must be part of the total universe of reality. 
No finite thing or event exists or occurs in complete isolation or 
self-dependence. The doctrine of extreme pluralism — that reality 
consists of an atomistic chaos of independent reals — scarcely merits 
extended refutation. Whether anything can exist out of relation 
without being known is a vain question. The more we know con- 
cerning the behavior of things in our world the clearer it becomes 
• that "all things in one another's being mingle." The "nature" 
of anything cannot be independent of its relations. Many relations 
of a thing may be conceived that, from one point of view, or for one 



104 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

purpose, are practically irrelevant or negligible, but, from other 
points of view, are relevant and important. It may be irrelevant 
to me whether a pupil has yellow hair or wears orange neckties, but 
if I were his haberdasher or his beloved these considerations might 
be very relevant. The assemblage of books, furnishings, writing 
materials, sporting tools, etc., in my study have no relevant rela- 
tions from the point of view of a logician or a botanist, but from 
my point of view or that of the tax assessor their relations to me 
or to one another are quite relevant. Nothing can exist absolutely 
out of relation or above relation, except the whole universe ; but 
since, by definition, the universe is the totality of related beings, 
to say that it is above relations is only to repeat, in somewhat mis- 
leading language, the definition of the universe as the systematic 
totality of related entities. 

Why should we argue that finite things which are partial 
aspects of experiential reality are appearances only, because they 
are not self -complete and self -existent % Does any rational being 
suppose that they are ? If taken for what they are, finite things 
are real though no one of them is absolute nor pretends to be. I 
can find no contradiction between an entity being real and being in 
relation. Empirical things and persons are not swallowed up and 
made to disappear when they are recognized to exist only in spe- 
cific relations. It seems to me a perverse attitude to assert that 
only a Spinozistic substance, as absolutely self-dependent and self- 
existent, can be real. An absolute that climbs up the ladder of 
relations and then pulls the ladder up into its superrelational lair 
may be forever secure against assault ; but, in so far as we human 
beings are concerned, it is unknowable, and we can hold no com- 
merce with it. If all relations and finite experiences and attitudes 
are transmuted in this absolute, how can all the flames of passion, 
chaste and carnal, still burn undisturbed in it ? How can degrees 
of reality and value belong, in the absolute, to finite beings and 
their experiences; since, so long as these latter exist, they are in 
relation, and are thus infected with contradiction and delusion ; 
and, when they are considered to have found rest in the absolute, 
they have lost their relational character and thus have lost all that 
made them what they were? How can the absolute be absolute 
and superrelational, if it includes and lives in all its appearances ? 
Logically it is as much dependent on the relational and transitory 
character of its various finite fragments as the latter are on it. 



APPEARANCE AND REALITY 105 

The relation between the absolute and its finite parts reminds one 
strongly of the economic system of the Scilly islanders who are said 
to live by taking in one another's washing. In Mr. Bradley's 
dialectics all empirical qualities and relations vanish in the endless 
process of a series of iucompletable relations, which absorbs all 
empirical distinctions and forever chases itself across the stage in 
the vain effort to swallow its own tail. 

I prefer to say that every fragment and aspect of finite experi- 
ence is real when taken in its right relations. I admit that at any 
moment we do not know completely the relations of any finite and 
empirical reality ; we do not know the total meaning of any reality. 
But what we have we have, and it is good for what it is good for 
and as far as it will go. The main features of experiential reality 
— space, time, causation, activity, novelty, or creative synthesis 
producing new results, effective volition based on valuation and 
choice; and therefore both physical change and volitionally initi- 
ated change, the organizing activity of life and mental selfhood or 
personality — all are real and none are absolute. 

The very notion of reality is relative to both our experiences 
and our interests or purposes. For us, the absolute reality must 
be either that which enables us to adjust our interests to our ex- 
periences or that which prevents such adjustment. Thus reality 
means experience interpreted in its maximal totality and integrity. 
If all human experience be illusion, there is no point in calling it 
illusion. It is the only reality we have. A reality which did not 
really appear in our experiences would be both useless and mean- 
ingless — a non-entity. 

The logical and psychological grounds for the distinction be- 
tween appearances and reality lie in the so-called errors of the 
senses which are really errors of judgment; in the discrepancies 
between our beliefs and expectations as arising out of our judg- 
ments in regard to past experiences, our traditional and individual 
prejudices, the influence of other persons and of our own desires 
and fears. In all such cases what we do is to put an actual experi- 
ence in the wrong context. Everything that is matter of experience 
is real in so far as it is taken for what it is, that is, taken in its 
right relations to other items of experience. 6 Everything sub- 



•The pan-objectivism of the neo-realist is based on exaggeration of this 
point. 



106 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

jective is of course real as matter of experience. Illusion and 
hallucination consist in putting experience in the wrong con 
text. If, for example, I assert that there are spots on an immac- 
ulate table cover, whereas the spots are in my eye, the spots in 
my eye are alarmingly real. My error was in placing these spots 
in wrong relations in the systems of experience. Everything rea 
is determinate. The determinate character of every real entity is 
determined by its own nature in relation to the natures of other 
entities. Nothing exists out of relation. The whole of reality is 
the totality of determinate beings in relations. 

There are many varying degrees of individuality in things 
from grains of sand and pebbles through crystals and the whole 
scale of living beings to the highest type of human personality. 
The existence of an ascending series of individualities is the basis 
of the doctrine that there are degrees of reality. 7 It is said that 
the self, although inconsistent, possesses a higher degree of reality 
than anything which is not a self. Goodness and truth are incon- 
sistent appearances, but they possess higher degrees of reality, that 
is, have more of individuality and harmony, than do evil and error. 
The absolute is the perfect individual whole, and hence it mani- 
fests itself in some appearances more fully than in others — in a 
well-organized human person more fully than in a rat, in the social 
moral order of a highly civilized culture more fully than in that 
of a tribe of savages, etc. The measure of the degree in which any 
appearance manifests the absolute is the degree of its individu- 
ality. 

The logical basis of the doctrine that the degree of individuality 
coincides with the degree of reality is the assumption that indi- 
viduality, the supreme standard of value, is the final criterion of 
reality ; in short, that the idea of value or perfection is the key to 
the nature of reality. 8 Now, no doubt the assumption that the 
standard of value is the standard of ultimate reality, that the being 
of highest value must be most real, is one that the philosopher 
inevitably makes. 9 If there be an ultimate unity of all other 
values — harmonious individuality, eternally perfect whole of 



7 Cf. Bradley, Appearance and Reality; and Bosanquet, The Principle of 
Individuality and Value, passim. 

8 This is the newest form of the ontological argument. 

9 Every great philosopher from Plato down to Koyce has made this as- 
sumption. 



APPEARANCE AND REALITY 107 

meaning, in which all lesser values are integrated — it will be the 
most weighty and consequential problem that a philosopher can 
engage upon to consider whether this ideal unity of all values be 
also the supremely existent or reality. But there are two distinct 
questions here : ( 1 ) What is the logical or metaphysical structure 
of reality? (2) What are the values of the various forms or 
structures of existence? More briefly: what are the general 
features of reality, and what values has reality as a whole ? The 
principal of harmonious individuality may be the highest criterion 
of value. It may be the case that the most comprehensive and 
stable organization of content is exemplified in mind and specif- 
ically in socialized mind or personality. It may be that social indi- 
viduality or personality is the ultimate criterion, source and 
sustainer of the intrinsic values of existence. Indeed, I hold that 
this is so ; but it seems to me to be introducing confusion of thought 
at the beginning of metaphysical inquiry, and in fact to be a beg- 
ging of the question, to assume that the final criterion of value is 
the only criterion of reality. We may have the right to believe 
that only harmoniously organized individuality rich in content is 
enduringly real. The most valuable realities may be the most per- 
manent, but I do not think we have the right to assume that the 
discordant or impermanent or changing are unreal. Everything is 
real in so far as it is taken for what it is. The whole of reality 
now is no more real than any one of its parts, for every part is 
just as necessary to the whole as the whole is to it. If any part, 
however insignificant, and ephemeral, become nonexistent the 
character of the whole is thereby altered. What right have we then 
to say that the whole is eternally the same although its parts are 
transitory appearances ? Before we can apply our criterion of 
value to the nature of reality as a whole we must by logical analysis 
determine the general structure of empirical reality. 

That reality must honor or sustain the fundamental meanings 
and values that are discovered, wrought out and interwoven in the 
texture of human experience is the basic postulate of knowledge 
and intelligent action. Reality must be shot through with and con- 
trolled by the values, theoretical, ethical, afTectional, and aesthetic, 
which man progressively discovers and realizes, in his manifold 
relations in the world totality; in which he is an interpreting, 
organizing, and, in some small measure at least, a creative factor. 
The fundamental forms of human self-activity, of which thought, 



108 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

action and feeling are distinguishable but not separable aspects, are 
phases of the, self -fulfillment of conscious life through the growth 
in selves of reflective intercourse with the world which may be 
called, indifferently, dynamic thinking or intelligent action. 
Knowledge is, though not in any narrowly utilitarian sense, a 
scheme or plan of action, by which selves can come into richer, 
more harmonious and durable relations with the whole of reality in 
which they are consciously dynamic elements; and, through so 
coming, can enrich, harmonize and conserve the life of conscious 
individuality. 

Royce argued that ideas are always plans of action, that every 
idea demands its own fulfillment; and Dewey has insisted that 
thought's function is to serve as an instrument of better adjust 
ment to the environment and of satisfaction of the self's interests 
If the latter term be taken in a sufficiently broad and inclusive 
sense we can accept it. The function of thought, the function of 
even the most abstract universals, such as mathematical concepts 
and philosophical categories, as well as of the most elemental 
meanings of experienced objects, such as food and warmth, is to 
enable the self to enrich, harmonize and preserve its own being, to 
enlarge, deepen and perpetuate the values of experience by finding 
and living in the right relations to its physical and social environ- 
ment. Only I would insist that an essential part of the higher life 
of selfhood consists in those experiences which we call aesthetic 
enjoyment, philosophical speculation and contemplation, and re- 
ligious devotion, as well as in communion with one's fellows in 
friendship and love. For, as we shall see more fully, in later 
chapters, the self lives most deeply, not in narrowly practical 
activities but in these experiences which bring it into union with 
other selves and with the universe. 

Thus knowledge or truth is dynamic. All meanings, uni- 
versals, wrought out in the process of thinking, are plans of conduct 
in the broad sense. Their function is to guide and lead the self, 
which has fashioned them to this end, into deeper, richer and more 
enduring experiential relations with the rest of reality. The self 
which seeks realization is a conscious dynamic center in a dynamic 
universe. And, of course, as we shall see more fully in the sequel, 
the cognitive and rational self develops and lives in social relations. 
Knowledge is the product and the instrument of socialized selfhood 
or personality; through it personality enhances its own life in a 



APPEARANCE AND REALITY 109 

universe in which it is an immanent center, a partial creator and 
sustainer of experience. Through the maintenance, enrichment 
and harmonization of personality alone does the universe acquire 
meaning. In knowledge, thought and the self who thinks do not 
transcend themselves or remain shut up within their own skin ; for 
the self who thinks is always a dynamic center in the world, a focus 
of cosmic forces; and knowledge is nothing else than the unique, 
because reflective, creative and universalizing, process or activity 
by which selves hold successful converse with the rest of reality. 



CHAPTEK VII 

ERROR 

In the present chapter I shall discuss the problem of error in 
its metaphysical bearings. 

The psychology of error is a very important subject, but to deal 
with it in detail would take considerable space and might divert us 
from our main purpose. 

The self lives in and through opposition, or what the Hegelian 
would call "negativity." The oppositions of life are contra- 
positives, or counter affirmations, not bare negations of affirmative 
positions. In the moral life the bad is not the mere absence of 
the good. There could be no moral life without the conflict of 
positive opposites. The good is often the enemy of the best. In 
aesthetic experience beauty lives by contrast with ugliness; and 
ugliness is not the mere absence of beauty, as common speech 
shows in its distinctions between beauty, plainness and ugliness. 
In the affectional life "sorrow's crown of sorrows is remembering 
happier things" ; and happiness's crown of happiness includes the 
memory of old unhappy far-off things. Similarly it is in the 
intellectual life. Truth is attained in conflict with error, and 
not merely by overcoming ignorance. It is often said that error 
is truth in the making. There is a soul of truth in propositions 
erroneous, and a soul of error in propositions true. But we must 
distinguish between mere ignorance and positive error, else we 
shall make shipwreck on the paradox, which Plato brings out in 
the Thesetetus and elsewhere — how can one think that which is 
not? If I am ignorant and am conscious that I am ignorant I 
commit no error. I err only when I believe and affirm a propo- 
sition in the absence of adequate empirical and rational grounds. 
Judgment involves belief and belief is the voluntary affirmation 
of a proposition, or of a complex of propositions. What one 
affirms to be true involves at least the volitional act of acknowl- 
edgment or acquiescence. It frequently involves the more active 
attitude of asserting or proponing judgments. Thus one cannot 

110 



ERROR 111 

be said to know or to claim truth who has not at least rethought 
and relived judgments into his own mental texture. Plato's dis- 
tinction between having truth and possessing it is relevant here. 
Truth is appropriated, no less than found, through personal ac- 
tivity. Knowing is, in logical terms, the judgmental activity by 
which a thinker affirms that a specific apprehended content of 
meaning holds good of reality. A belief is a judgment, that is, 
a proposition made or accepted by the will as intellectual act. 

The acquisition of truth through the activity of the self, and 
the intellectual development of the self through the acquisition 
of truth involve error; since it is only by overcoming error that 
one achieves truth. We cannot understand what a finite knower 
would be like without the possibility of error, any more than we 
can understand what a finite moral agent would be like without 
the possibility of sin. 

Ignorance, I have said, is not in itself error, but one may err 
through ignorance; in other words, if one is ignorant of, or 
ignores, his own ignorance, and makes an affirmation he errs. One 
may err through failure to define clearly and distinctly what it is 
that one seeks to know. For example, I may err in a scientific 
investigation because I am ignorant of my ignorance of the pres- 
ence of certain disturbing causes. I may err because I am igno- 
rant of certain defects in my sense organs or in my logical pro- 
cesses of analysis and inference. In practical affairs one may err 
through ignorance of one's own powers, deficiencies or motives, 
or through ignorance of other men in the same respects. One 
may err through prejudices, inherited from tradition or acquired 
through social suggestion, or through one's own predilections. 
One may err through impatience and haste, due to desire, hope, 
fear or dogmatic self-assertiveness. If the mind received knowl- 
edge by passively reflecting the actual world, if truth were a 
mirrorlike reproduction or copying of reality, as representation- 
ism assumes, the possibility and fact of error would be unaccount- 
able. On the copy theory of truth error would be meaningless. 
The mind would keep step with the world and there would be no 
contrast possible between truth and error. Thus the fact of error 
refutes pure empiricism or sensationalism. It is because the self 
develops its mental life in dynamic intercourse with the world 
that error is possible. Judging is reflective willing, or the activity 
of the individual intellect. 



112 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

Error, in distinction from the mere absence of knowledge, is 
due either to emotional perturbations of the intellect or to the 
influence of unthinking habits of acquiescence, the result of man's 
tendency to accept, through social suggestion, prevailing habits of 
belief. Descartes was right, in part, at least in attributing error 
to the influence of the will, in the sense of the emotional and 
impulsive tendency in man to over-hasty judgment and absence 
of critical discrimination. As Hume wisely said, belief is more 
properly the offspring of the sensitive than of the intellectual part 
of our nature. Of course one may err from involuntary ignorance. 
There is doubtless such a thing as invincible ignorance of one's own 
ignorance. There is, however, also voluntary ignorance; igno- 
rance due to the unwillingness of the individual to repress the 
emotional solicitations to belief or to resist the pressure of social 
suggestion. 

Thus error, in the full sense, is a denial of the will to know, a 
refusal to will the whole truth. Obedience to the will to know 
carries with it the duty to doubt, to suspend judgment and repress 
the impulse to believe and assert. In the ethics of thought it is a 
paramount obligation to cultivate the consciousness of ignorance, 
to be skeptical and critical of particular propositions that clamor 
for belief. One has heard much of the will to believe. For a 
rational being the will to disbelieve, the duty to doubt, constitutes 
a greater obligation than the will to believe. In so far as one is 
conscious of one's ignorance and fallibility the sting of ignorance 
is drawn; the mind is transmuting ignorance into knowledge in 
the very process of doubting its own prejudices and prepossessions ; 
for the greatest obstacle to the growth and spread of truth probably 
does not lie in unavoidable ignorance nor in mental impotence. It 
lies chiefly, rather, in mental inertia, in unwillingness to bear the 
pangs of doubt, and to undergo the labor of that critical and 
skeptical quest without which truth is not gained or possessed. 
Man will not will the whole truth because he is emotionally incited 
to accept specific propositions at their face value. To save himself 
the labor of rigorous analysis and the pain of resisting his appetites 
and desires, his hopes and fears, to gain time and energy for the 
satisfaction of desires other than that of clear and coherent think- 
ing, man refuses to continue the enterprise of thinking ; that is, of 
suspense of belief, rigorous analysis and the weighing of alter- 
native possibilities. 



ERROR 113 

Thus the assertion that one has the whole truth is the denial 
of the coherence of truth and experience. This denial has often 
brought direful consequences. For example, when the Inquisition 
persecuted Galileo in order to maintain what proved to be an 
erroneous cosmology, when Calvin caused Servetus to be burned, 
and in countless similar instances, the errors committed consisted 
in the affirmation of misinterpreted systems containing partial 
truths as the whole truth. The willful assertion of a partial truth 
as a whole truth or of a belief as final, in the face of its incom- 
patibility with observed facts and logical deductions therefrom, 
constitutes radical error — the sin against the spirit of truth. In 
the face of man's intellectual history it cannot be denied that there 
is a voluntary error which arises from the violation of that ethical 
obligation to will the whole truth, of which the duty to doubt 
specific propositions is the converse. The intrinsic value of truth 
is a form of the intrinsic ethical value of rational selfhood. The 
true is by no means always the most obvious or pleasantest or most 
profitable in speedy returns. The search for truth demands self- 
discipline and self-abnegation, qualities rarer in institutions and 
parties than even in individuals. Here as elsewhere, in the 
spiritual life, he that seeketh his life shall lose it, and he that 
loseth his life shall find it. The recognition of the intrinsic worth 
of truth as a living system, into which the individual must pene- 
trate by personal activity, and to which he owes absolute allegiance 
at the cost of abandoning his most cherished prejudices and pas- 
sions, is the intuition of a universal spiritual quality in the self. 
The recognition of the impersonal and absolute value of truth 
impels the self to seek actively the maximal comprehensiveness and 
harmony or coherence in experience and in its reflective interpreta- 
tion. Coherence in our beliefs is not subservient to any ulterior 
end. Reflective thinking presupposes the coherent meaningfulness 
of reality ; in knowing, the self seeks to make reality its conscious 
possession, or vice versa, to remake itself into a center of signifi- 
cant awareness of reality. Truth means the reflective organization 
of experience, under the guidance of the ideal of a harmonious 
intuition or coherent system of meanings, which is the apprehen- 
sion of reality as an intelligible whole or cosmos. The particular 
facts in nature, history, the social order, or the individual life, 
get their meanings through their universalizing connections in 
the organic totality of experience. Thus no isolated datum is 



114 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

true. There are no absolutely atomic facts. In this sense there are 
degrees of truth — degrees of approximation to the ideal of a com- 
pletely articulated system of meanings in which the individual 
thinker transcends his private and particular existence and holds 
converse with the nature of the world. That the real universe is, 
at least in posse, a coherent or intelligible whole is the fundamental 
postulate of thought. Thus knowledge moves on from stage to 
stage in the unity of reflective life, in so far as it contributes to 
the enrichment of the intuition of reality as a harmonious whole 
of individual elements. 

Emerging first in the urgent pressure of vital needs and appe- 
tites, the life of reflective thinking acquires, in the course of social 
evolution and individual development, an intrinsic value in propor- 
tion as selves take on a more reflective and rational character. 
Eeflective thinking remains always a function of personal life. 
Truth enriches and harmonizes personality. But, in the growth 
of reflection, thought ceases to be merely an instrument for reach- 
ing extrinsic ends. Thought becomes an integral function of the 
self, enriching the contents and transforming the quality of life 
itself. No longer merely a means to ulterior ends, reflective 
thinking becomes a part of the supreme end — the fulfillment of 
personality. 

The study of early mythologies and cosmogonies indicates that 
disinterested curiosity and delight in the free play of productive 
imagination and reasoning must have appeared quite early in the 
history of the race. But the successful development of free mental 
activity was not possible without a considerable degree of practical 
control over nature. Man must first be liberated from the urgent 
pressure of hunger, physical discomfort and sex appetite and from 
debasing fears before he can do much disinterested thinking. It 
is the employment of knowledge as an instrument of practical 
utility which removes the hindrances in the way of the free and 
disinterested activity of thought. In this respect the development 
of knowledge is analogous to the development of art, which has 
• likewise passed from being a tribal utility to being an intrinsic 
form of personal value. 

I have said that all activity of thought, over and above that 
which is impelled by the pressure of practical needs, arises from 
a sense of the intrinsic value of truth for the development of per- 
sonality by intellectual union with the universe of reality. Thus 



ERROR 115 

truth, as a form of intrinsic value, means the realization of spir- 
itual personality through contemplation of the universe — the intel- 
lectual love of God. He in whom the desire for this contemplative 
union with the nature of things has not been awakened is not yet 
a full personality. In the urge to know the truth for its own sake 
man stands in the presence of an ultimate spiritual quality. On 
the other hand, truth does not exist for him who feels no obligation 
to seek it for its own sake ; just as the good or the beautiful do not 
exist for those who feel no desire to seek them for their own sakes. 
Truth, goodness and beauty are their own excuses for being. 



CHAPTEK VIII 

THE FINAL GROUND OF KNOWLEDGE 1 

It may be well to summarize our main conclusions thus far. 
Thinking is not a mirror which passively reflects a world outside; 
valid thoughts are not copies of things. Thought is active in 
knowing, no less than in willing. It is obviously the case that 
the individual mind in knowing does not create the materials of 
knowledge, not even of its own self-knowledge. There are always 
determinate data for thought given through immediate experience. 
On the other hand, it is a fruitless endeavor to attempt to define 
the original data of experience in terms of a so-called pure experi- 
ence or an absolute sensible minimum of experience. Sense data or 
sensa, as Mr. S. Alexander calls them, are thought data ; for per- 
ception is implicit or incipient judgment. We can draw no line, 
on one side of which are the sensa and on the other side are 
judgments. Pure sensations are artificial products of analysis. 
There is no such thing as "pure" experience. It is an abstraction. 
Actual experience, in its crudest terms, is the reaction of mind >to 
stimuli, but the most immediate datum is the experience as re- 
ceived and categorized by mind. The stimulus is an inferential 
or logical construct. Even electrons or ether have meaning only as 
organically related to minds perceiving movements", stresses and 
strains, attractions and repulsions, colors, etc. 

The cognitive value of the entire realm of the unconscious or 
not-self depends on the readiness with which the most immediate 
experiences, as meeting points of self and not-self, lend themselves 
to interpretation and reconstruction in terms of the self's control- 
ling interests and categories. (I have said "unconscious or not- 
self" because, in so far as a self may know itself, what it knows is 
not itself as knowing. I leave in abeyance for the present the 
question whether, and how, a self may know itself.) While the 

ir This chapter is the revision of an article under the same title which 
appeared in The Philosophical Beview, Vol. xvii., No. 4, July, 1908, pp. 383-399. 

116 



THE FINAL GROUND OF KNOWLEDGE 117 

external world has a determinate and independent order, this order 
is found not to exclude the interpretative influence of thought and 
the directive influence of purpose. The self is able to know to 
some extent the order of nature and to adjust its own activities 
thereto. The most obvious test of knowledge is that, taken by and 
large, it works. Moreover, the external world does not dictate 
unconditionally to the mind the direction which its thoughts and 
purposes shall take. Nor does it determine the rate at which 
knowledge shall grow. Human thinking in its theoretical and 
practical procedure is self-determining, in the sense that it selects 
the data which it shall reconstruct in accordance with its own aims. 
The history of science, with its varied rates of procedure in differ- 
ent fields and in difTeren + epochs of culture, bears out this truth. 
The individuality of every investigator enters into his choice and 
manner of work but, still more, every age has its intellectual 
fashions and fads. 

The responsiveness of the external world to the permanent 
categories and changing aims of human thought implies a dynamic 
correspondence, an organic interrelationship between mind and 
world. Either the development of knowledge is the coming to 
awareness in minds, and the expression in mind-made symbols, of 
this dynamic community; and, hence, the world of reality is in 
some large sense a rational or intelligible system akin in structure, 
though on a much vaster scale, to mind ; or else knowledge hangs in 
the air, its validity is a mere human prejudice and hence even the 
partial successes of knowledge give us no authentic tidings of the 
nature of reality. 

It is quite the fashion to argue that the standard mind or 
social mind is the final test of truth. By this is meant the agree- 
ment of different minds under the same conditions. If we cannot 
apply the test of universal consent, quod semper, quod ubique et 
ab omnibus, we may rely on the experts, and experts are socially 
recognized authorities. The truth of a proposition, then, becomes 
a question of its social standing; and, on the other hand, since 
men's minds notoriously differ, we must presuppose, when we 
apply the test, that we are making reference to the real masters. 
I do not question the practical value of this test. The authority of 
experts may be the final court of appeal for the laymen. But this 
test, after all, has only approximate value. Nobody knows who 
the real masters are but the masters themselves and they by no 



118 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

means always agree. Moreover, the social test rests on a sup- 
pressed premise. It presupposes a common rational structure in 
all minds and the possibility of a common relation of all minds to 
reality. The standard mind or social mind is an abstraction. 
Thinking goes on, and truth is known, only in individual minds. 
Thus the very recognition of other minds and of an external world 
common to minds implies that the individual mind is, potentially 
at least, a microcosmic center of valid intercourse with reality. 
The self, the other self and their world, must all be elements in a 
systematic and intelligible whole. The validity of truth cannot 
depend finally upon the cooperative thinking of human society, 
since in the latter knowledge is always imperfect and growing 
whereas truth, by its very nature, means a reality not created by 
the historical and psychological accidents of discovery. The de- 
velopment of society, through the growth of knowledge, presup- 
poses the same intelligible and systematic order of reality which 
the cognitive success of the individual mind presupposes. If the 
conditions of the validity of knowledge are not directly implicated 
in the movement of the individual's thinking those conditions can- 
not be established by averaging individual minds into a standard 
social mind. 

Doubtless, knowledge of one's neighbors is, at all stages of 
human development, of greater practical and emotional interest 
than knowledge of nature. But this does not place the former on 
a generically different plane from the latter, nor give it a validity 
of a higher order. Both kinds of knowledge begin in immediate 
experience — perceptions of contact, form, color, movement, etc., 
in the one case ; and the feeling of another life and consciousness 
in the other case. 2 How much in the dark we often are as to our 
fellows' motives and ideas, not to mention those of the animals ! 

In both cases our knowledge requires to be corrected and en- 
larged by the same mental processes. Both forms of immediate 
experience must be mediated, in order to yield surer practical 
guidance and a fuller insight. 

When we employ the various logical methods of investigating 
and testing the results of thinking, we are not comparing the latter 
with something wholly alien to itself. We are testing the adequacy 
of our symbols and formulae with reference to the ideal of a self- 

2 Lipps neatly distinguishes the immediate experience of external objects 
and of other selves as Empfindung and Einfuhlung respectively. 



THE FINAL GROUND OF KNOWLEDGE 119 

coherent or wholly systematized experience. Knowledge is intra- 
experiential, in the sense that the materials and points of departure 
for cognitive thinking are found in immediate experience; and, 
again, knowledge involves all along the line a reference to experi- 
ence, in the sense that its goal is a complete or perfected experi- 
ence, in which every datum is become an element in a harmonious 
system. On the other hand, in relation to any actual experience, 
cognitive thinking has always a transcendent reference, since this 
complete or perfect experience is for us in part only "ideal" or 
"possible." We can conceive reality as a systematic and self- 
consistent whole only in terms of the structure and functions of a 
"possible" perfect experience or transcendental mind; a mind that 
transcends in its complete coherence the mind of every finite self 
and in which all the data of knowledge are present in their organic 
unity. Valid knowledge is the symbol of, and the actual reference 
of the individual's thought to a reality, which, whatever the quali- 
tative variety and quantitative multiplicity of its elements, must 
have those coherences or relationships that are commonly called 
"rational." 

While truth has for me its point of departure in my experi- 
ence, and implies other selves, its ultimate reference must tran- 
scend the experience of any finite self. And knowledge is always 
the reflective consciousness of some relation or group of relations 
between a thinking mind and the systematic whole of a self- 
coherent reality in which the mind so thinking is an element. 
Reality may have many series of increasingly inclusive systematic 
unities, from that of unconscious physical centers of relationship 
up to that of an absolute self-luminous unity of "ideal" experience. 
If reality in all its forms were not always intelligible, at least in 
promise and potency, knowledge could have no absolute validity. 
Truth for man is an individual achievement and possession here 
and now in a particular mind, and yet it must possess universality 
of reference, that is, be timelessly valid for all. How can we 
reconcile these attributes of truth ? Kant and his immediate fol- 
lowers based the objectivity of truth on the existence of a con- 
sciousness or mind common to all individuals, but, in itself, over- 
individual and absolutely distinct from the empirical ego. But 
they failed to make clear the relation of this universal conscious- 
ness (Bewusstsein uberhaupt) or "transcendental ego" to the indi- 
vidualized human consciousness. In Kant's theoretical philosophy 



120 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the former seems to be a merely formal unity. And, from one 
point of view, the metaphysics of Fichte and Hegel were attempts 
simply to bring this notion of a universal mind into more definite 
relation with that of the individual mind. We must now consider 
this problem. 

I have already maintained that thinking selves develop knowl- 
edge or attain truth only in community with other members of a 
relational system, and that the success of the individual mind in 
reaching truth indicates that the world of reality need contain 
nothing absolutely impenetrable by mind. Individual minds have 
knowledge only as members of an intelligible system of things. 
Community of experience and universality, as attributes of truth, 
involve a fundamental identity of function, and hence of nature, 
in the elements of reality. Hence reality, in its systematic totality 
of meaning, must be a rational unity. The total real must have 
that intelligible character which is demanded by the place that 
human cognitive activity occupies therein. If any knowledge be 
valid, then the real universe is an intelligible and systematic 
whole, that is, a rational organization. If there be any truth, and 
if the real world be a unity, this truth is valid only as an element 
in a systematic whole of meaning. This systematic whole must 
signify, or define, in terms of meaning and value, that aspect of 
reality which exists as the totality of objects of truth. 

Truth, we say, is universal and necessary. By these attributes 
we obviously mean that any normal mind, placed in the same con- 
ditions and having had the same training and antecedent experi- 
ence, must recognize the truth, or significant reference to existence, 
of the judgment which we have made or accepted. But to appeal 
to a normal mind as the standard of recognition for truth is to 
assume a common and universal structure and functioning in indi- 
vidual minds. This common rational structure is the universal 
mind or thinker, the ground of the relational or rational system 
which is the ideal of knowledge. 

The ultimate subject of reference in valid knowledge, then, is 
a systematic cosmic mind. Just in so far as the world is a uni- 
verse it must be embodied mind. The reality of this mind is pre- 
supposed whenever we test our judgments and theories by refer- 
ence, either to the general conditions of valid thinking, or to the 
special conditions of actual existence. The test of self -consistency, 
that is, of noncontradiction in a system, implies the ultimate 



THE FINAL GROUND OF KNOWLEDGE 121 

reality of the rational coherent structure which functions in indi- 
vidual minds. The test of empirical reference to perception, in 
scientific induction, presupposes the coherence of the physical 
world-order with the structure and aims of mind in us. If there 
be any truth, the existing objects to which truth makes valid and 
significant reference must possess the specific character which 
makes truth valid and significant. If truth be valid, the elements 
of reality which are not in themselves consciously significant ideas, 
or valid meanings, must conform to valid meanings, that is, to 
cognitive acts of reference. In short, ultimate reality is twofold 
in nature. It includes, in organic interrelationship, the valid 
reality of truth, or of the system of cognitive meanings, and the 
existential reality of thought's objects of reference. And the valid 
reality of truth as a systematic whole presupposes that all existent 
objects, whether physical or psychical, are possible subjects of 
cognitive meanings. Ultimate reality, then, must be a duality-in- 
unity — cosmic thought whose object is the cosmos. 

Indeed, mind or spirit is essentially a self-realizing process 
which knows, feels, and acts through "differences/' and which 
fulfills itself in overcoming differences. In winning truth, mind 
affirms its oneness with the "other" or "object" to which truth 
refers, as, in winning the good, mind affirms the oneness of its 
impulses and character with an ideal end, or as, in experiencing 
the beautiful, mind feels its harmony with the object. The 
unceasing movement of mind towards conscious self-possession and 
self-determination, through that which is other than itself, is the 
primal condition of its conscious meaningful life. Did this move- 
ment cease, mind must relapse into the unconsciousness of a dead 
thing. 

Truth, in the specific sense, is always the significant symbol of 
relationships of things which belong to some kind of system. Even 
the truths of mathematics are but highly generalized signs of rela- 
tionship among real things. Now, relationships that could not be 
cognized or felt by some mind would be unmeaning. One who 
asserts the existence of relationships inaccessible to any thinking 
center is able to do so only because, in thinking this supposed inde- 
pendence, he presupposes implicitly some sort of world mind or 
objective rational structure. Relationships signify intelligible 
connections, and the reality of the latter presupposes a constitutive 
or sustaining act of intelligence. 



122 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

There can, then, be no truth or knowledge which does not 
obtain in and for some mind. And, if there can be no world of 
existents unqualified by truth or meaning, there can be no world 
of existents without a world mind. One might, of course, arbi- 
trarily assume a reality utterly independent of all mind; but a 
reality of this sort would be forever beyond the pale of discussion 
and utterly meaningless, since without positive reference to our 
experience. Hence, the whole system of psychical and other finite 
existences, with whose interactions and interpassions the indi- 
vidual knower's experience is inextricably bound up, and on which 
in specific cases knowledge seems to depend for the validity of its 
meanings, must in turn depend upon a more intimate systematic 
unity. The system of individual experiences must have a real 
basis for the unity that it depends upon at every moment in its 
life and for its continuity from moment to moment in the world's 
history. The common basis for thought and knowledge must 
transcend alike the individual consciousness and the so-called 
"social consciousness," which latter is real only as a set or attitude 
of the individual mind. It follows from the principle that nothing 
can at once exist and have meaning which does not exist for a 
mind, that the single ground of the social system of individual 
meanings must be for some mind or center of experience. ' In a 
final analysis the objectivity of truth, the valid reference of knowl- 
edge to reality, depends on the reality of a single, systematic 
intelligence, which must have a determinate character, since it is 
the ground of a determinate system of cognitions. 

But, now, the question confronts us: Why need there be any 
absolute truth at all? What right has one to assume that any 
knowledge has final validity, that any system of cognitive meanings 
is honored by the universe, that things have any ultimate signifi- 
cance whatsoever ? These queries might be answered by pointing 
to the splendid practical successes of science in giving man control 
over the physical world. But this would be only a makeshift 
answer. For, again, the objection might be urged that our knowl- 
edge is, after all, as yet very limited, is constantly changing, and 
the years of human science are infinitesimally few in comparison 
with the ageless duration of the universe. Therefore, it is possible 
that our fragmentary science, with its ideal of systematic com- 
pleteness forever unrealized, is but a happy hit which more or less 
successfully fits into the present phase of an ageless, ever changing 



THE FINAL GROUND OF KNOWLEDGE 123 

chaos. The vaunted fitness of science to the world may be but a 
chance coincidence amidst a chaos of innumerable possibilites. 
On the ground of a utilitarian success alone, we are not entitled to 
assume any final validity in knowledge nor any absolute truth. 

It is true, nevertheless, that the skeptic is himself unable to 
refrain from assertion or judgment of some sort. In his deepest 
doubt there lurks the assumption of a possible knowable truth. 
Even when he suspends judgment and refrains from any assertion, 
he assumes that he knows enough about the nature of things to 
make every more specific assertion futile. In short, to seek truth 
is a fundamental impulse of rational human nature, an impulse 
from which the most radical skeptic cannot free himself. To 
become reflectively aware of any experience is to make judgments, 
and to make a judgment is to assume that some reality is intelli- 
gible, that some truth is valid. Even the skeptic cannot free him- 
self from the rule of the instinct to know. His most radical ques- 
tionings presuppose the possibility of an answer. His most con- 
sistent attempts to suspend all judgment imply at the least this 
judgment about reality, viz., that it is so constituted that no human 
judgment can be valid for it, or that there is no means of deter- 
mining whether any specific judgment is valid. 

In short, to think at all, even in terms of the most radical 
skepticism, is to assume the validity of truth. We must seek truth 
and promote its recognition, because it is a mode or function of 
the common spiritual nature in men. Truth is an end in itself, 
since it is an integral pulsation of universal reason in the spirit 
of man. In attaining truth the individual thinker is entering into 
the universal heritage of mind. 

Serious objection may be made to the doctrine that the supreme 
cosmic or systematic intelligence, on which truth is made to rest, 
has self -consciousness. It may be urged that, however completely 
I may organize my experience into knowledge, still my experience 
and thought, as finite, are dependent on a "not-self" or "other." 
Knowledge seems always to involve both a resemblance or com- 
munity of nature between the knowing self and the not-self or 
other," and a duality of being. So far as our insight goes, it 
seems, then, that the very condition of a conscious selfhood and, 
therefore, of experience and knowledge in general, is the existence 
of an element that cannot be comprehended in or absorbed into the 
self's thinking. Therefore, it may be said, as soon as one conceives 



124 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

knowledge to be absolute, one thinks tbe self as absolutely 
coincident with the data of experience. Knowing "self and 
known "object" collapse or coalesce into a higher unity. 3 The 
objective reference or validity of knowledge in relation to the 
materials of experience ceases, since there is no longer any existen- 
tially outer object or "other" to which thought can be referred by 
the self. Knowledge, when it becomes absolute, fuses wholly with 
its object and self -consciousness ceases, or is transmuted into some- 
thing else — into some higher, and, by us, inconceivable kind of 
experience. It would follow that in this higher state of insight 
or experience there can be no longer any cognitive consciousness, 
as we human beings understand consciousness, nor any truth as we 
conceive truth. The complete union of self and not-self results in 
something which may be more than a conscious self, but which 
certainly cannot be a self in the sense in which we know the self 
reflectively. Hence, the systematic intelligence on which the . 
whole of knowledge depends cannot be self-conscious and nothing 
can be true for it. It may be a perfectly harmonious immediate 
experience a la Mr. Bradley, but it cannot be a self. 

Now, it must be admitted that, if a self-coherent totality of 
truth be real in and for a consciousness, the relation of such a con- 
sciousness to some of its objects (that is, to those objects of its 
knowledge that are not its own internal and immediate states of 
feeling) must differ decidedly from the relation of any human 
consciousness to its corresponding objects. For us objects always 
remain partially opaque. Truth cannot be a perfect organism, 
unless it mean the thorough comprehension by the knower of the 
determinate world of objects. A universal knower must, then, as 
conscious knower, have a world of "objects" and, as perfect knower, 
must wholly penetrate, with an intuitive insight, this world. Such 
a knower must be in some sense the ground of his own experience. 



'Those who emphasize the " immediate ' ' character of " absolute" in- 
sight, as a state in whieh the distinction of knowing subject and object of 
thought is "abolished," "overcome," or "transcended," are fond of citing 
emotion and, especially, personal love, as illustrations of what sort this higher 
state may be. But the illustrations are hardly satisfactory from their stand- 
point. In personal love the distinction between lover and beloved is not 
abolished or overcome. Kequited love is surely a ease of unity-in-duality. 
The two persons are, indeed, one, but thereby their distinctive personalities 
are enhanced and enriched to one another, not transmuted into a higher im- 
personal unity. Love is, indeed, a good illustration of what knowledge strives 
to become without ceasing to be knowledge. 



THE FINAL GROUND OF KNOWLEDGE 125 

So far as his experience depends on the activities and experiences 
of other beings, their experiences must, in turn, somehow depend 
on his activity. A world which is the "other" of his thought can- 
not have self -existence external to his will. Hence, such a knower 
must sustain the world of objects which he knows. The "opposi- 
tion" between his thought and its objects, for example, the move- 
ments of a material system or the activities of living and conscious 
beings, must originate in his own activity. His life can be 
"limited" or "determined," only in the sense that he is conscious 
as originating an "opposition" through and in which he finds con- 
sciousness; in other words, he is conscious as self -determining 
activity that constitutes the "other" for his own conscious experi- 
ence. 

This is a difficult notion that probably no amount of reflection 
will make plain to our finite and growing minds. But sun-clear 
lucidity is not to be expected in such matters. Moreover, there is 
that in the nature of human consciousness which gives us some 
inkling of the possible nature of a "higher" consciousness. For 
it is not true that knowledge, in all its phases, depends on the 
opposition of a wholly external "other." The impulse to know is 
by no means always a compulsion from without, and in self- 
knowledge the object is within the knower 's thought. The higher 
phases of knowledge involve the self-initiative of the knower who 
in knowing enlarges his being. 

In order to satisfy its demands for reflective insight into the 
nature of things, the finite self must seemingly go outside its pres- 
ent selfhood. But, indeed, the truer view is that in knowledge, as 
in any kind of genuine self-activity, growth in depth, extent, and 
organization involves a constant dialectic movement between the 
two poles of internally initiated interests and activity and exter- 
nally given materials and obstacles. And the goal of this move- 
ment is twofold — the internal appropriation or interpretation of 
the not-self, and the expansion and enrichment of the self. In this 
dialectic process of development through "opposition," the mind 
assimilates a seemingly foreign world more and more completely 
to itself and enlarges its own being thereby. In knowledge, which 
; is a special case of this general movement, the "other," which first 
appears as a negation of the knowing mind, is progressively over- 
i come and unified with the mind. 

The process of knowledge, and, indeed, of experience as a 



126 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

whole, is a progressive overcoming of the fundamental antithesis 
between self and not-self, which is the nerve of all intellectual 
activity, of moral endeavor, aesthetic vision, and religious aspira- 
tion. The meaning of the antithesis is that it is there to be over- 
come; and the self is potentially infinite, since it can overcome 
unceasingly the opposition in question. It does overcome this 
opposition, and make it tributory to its own self-fulfillment, in 
finding the true, as in willing the good and enjoying the beautiful. 

This process of self-realization is illustrated in the social world, 
where selves cooperate to win truth and goodness and to embody 
the vision of beauty. The farther the social relationships of selves 
develop, in the direction of mutual understanding and inclusive 
sympathy, the more completely does the single self learn to find 
itself in and through other selves. It dies to its narrow selfhood to 
live in a larger experience. The primitive savage is so ignorant 
and fearful that to him every stranger is an enemy, a point of 
absolute "opposition." The cultivated man of the twentieth cen- 
tury can appreciate the meaning of a world-literature and cherish 
the thought of a universal peace and of a humane social ethics. 
He lives through and with others in a vastly wider, richer, and 
more harmonious experience than that of the savage. The deeper 
and more harmonious a self's experiences become, the more 
rationally communicable and sharable do they grow. Progress in 
rational self-consciousness is at once a growth in internal self- 
enlightenment and in communal experience. A living world of 
socially related individual centers tends toward fuller unity-in- 
variety. And the "otherness" of its world of things and selves is 
a prime condition of the human self s growth in knowledge, as in 
goodness and in all the forms of harmonious experience. Without 
"opposition," "contrast" or "negativity" to be lived through, there 
is no reflective insight and no ethical volition. Now, the growth in 
knowledge is simply the explication and the revelation of that com- 
munity between the self and its world (of things and selves) which 
is implicit from the very outset of mental life. 

Object and subject of knowledge, then, are strictly co-relative. 
The imperfection and indirection of our human knowledge result 
from the finite and growing character of the individual members 
of the world system, both as knowers and as known. On the other 
hand, if there be a systematic, self-consistent whole of truth, the 
mind for which this truth is true must have an insight that wholly 






THE FINAL GROUND OF KNOWLEDGE 127 

penetrates, while yet it consciously lives in, the contrast of subject- 
knower and object-known. Its knowledge, it would seem, can 
neither be impelled nor limited by anything that remains stub- 
bornly outside the reach of its experience and immediate insight. 

A supreme mind, of course, could not be a knower without an 
object of knowledge. But, on the other hand, if such a mind be 
the ground of truth in its self-consistent totality, that is, if it be 
the source and basis of the unity and continuity of cognition in 
finite centers of being, then the "objects" of its knowledge cannot 
constitute external and stubbornly opaque limits to its world 
insight. Every object, for a supreme self, must depend on the 
consent of his will or somehow have its basis of existence in his 
being. The finite self may possess its own unique experience and 
be the proximate initiating center of its own deeds, but its being 
and action must be impossible out of relation to the supreme mind 
who sustains its life and experience as an element in the whole 
system of reality. One could not conceive a supreme mind without 
finite centers of experience. Their lives and activities must enter, 
as elements, into the unity of its insight. Just as a finite self may 
be said to have his experiences sympathetically reproduced by 
other finite selves, so by analogy a supreme mind may be said to 
apprehend intuitively and in perfect degree the mind of a finite 
self without abolishing the latter's unique experience and life. 
Mind can give to mind without losing, and take without robbing. 
Truth may be shared in common by a multitude of minds and yet 
refer to one indivisible object. So a finite self, here and now, will 
have this bit of experience or this particular propositional truth as 
a unique element in his mental history, but the final validity and 
significance of this local and limited experience will depend upon 
its relations in and to the whole of the absolute or "ideal" experi- 
ence of the supreme mind. The latter may know our experiences 
as elements in the systematic meaning of the universe, while our 
experiences remain uniquely valid for us. 

Of course, it is possible to assert that knowledge is but a 
transient episode in an unconscious universe. But, if so, and if 
the universe have any coherence, then no knowledge is true, since 
there is no absolute whole of truth. If there be no organism of 
truth, then the statement that knowledge is an episode in an un- 
conscious universe is untrue, and there is no universe except for 
one who is willing to make unmeaning assertions. 



128 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

The "experience" or knowledge possessed by the universal 
mind or spirit must, as we have seen, be direct and intuitive, in 
contrast with the hindered and piecemeal character of most of our 
human knowledge. The Universal Mind must apprehend truth in 
its systematic totality, and the absolute truth must be the whole 
system of relations and terms which is intuitively perceived or 
grasped in a single and continuous act by such a mind. 

It would seem to follow that neither the truths of mathematics 
nor of perception (the two poles of human knowledge) need exist 
for such a mind precisely as they exist for our minds. Obviously 
perceptive intelligence in such a mind must grasp every item of 
perception in all its relations, and this our minds never do. The 
universal mind must be an intuitive intelligence ; our minds are 
largely discursive in their operations. For example, the proposi- 
tion that 2 + 2 = 4, or that the three interior angles of a triangle 
are together equal to two right angles, need not represent acts of 
thought for a perfect intuitive intelligence. Grasping space in its 
final truth, in the totality of the real, such a mind does not need 
to geometrize. I venture to suggest that the intuitive processes of 
the highest genius in science, poetry, art, processes which tran- 
scend discursive thinking, give us the best hints of the nature of a 
supreme intuitive intelligence at once universal and individual. 

While the universal mind is the necessary implicate of the 
system of finite existences, sentient and insentient, and cannot be 
thought out of relation to these, it cannot be an existent in the 
same sense in which finite things exist. Its being must at once 
transcend every form of existence and sustain the system of the 
finite in its organized totality of meanings or of truth. The ulti- 
mate presupposition of truth's reality or validity is a transcendent 
mind or "ideal" experience, whose being is the pure actuality of 
intuitive thinking or active reason, and wbose expression is two- 
fold — the validity of knowledge and the system of finite existents 
concerning which knowledge is valid. 

It is not difficult to see that truths of logical and mathematical 
relationships may constitute one unchangeable system of truths, 
the object of an absolute thinker's reason. But the case is very 
different with the concrete and particular truths of fact in a 
developing or evolving world. If the world be really in evolution 
the succession of facts and deeds in the world process cannot be, as 
such, one eternal and unchangeable system for any thinker. The 



THE FINAL GROUND OF KNOWLEDGE 129 

knowledge of events and deeds in the world's history must involve 
a time sequence. The time process must be real. There may be 
at any instant a single, continuous and comprehensive whole of 
intuitive insight into the events and relations of the evolving world. 
But such a knowledge cannot be eternally unchangeable. The his- 
tories of selves and their world must make a difference in the 
supreme intuitive experience. The so-called timeless or eternal 
truths of logic and mathematics can represent only the structural 
skeleton of the world order. On the other hand, if truth implies a 
thinker or knower then the truths of fact and deed in the evolving 
history of the world must, if the universe be a coherent and intel- 
ligible universe, constitute elements in the universal knower's 
experience. The latter must be a unitary intuition or systematic 
whole of meaning. The world process, inclusive of the histories of 
finite selves, must enter into this one concrete living and dynamic 
intuition. The world experiencer must manifest his being and 
know himself in the total process of temporal reality. All truth 
won and error perpetrated by finite selves must be contributory to 
his total insight. The world experient must be more than con- 
sciousness and more than thought. It must be the self-active whole 
of meaning or will-reason which lives and energizes through the 
lives of developing selves in an evolving world. Its intuition of its 
world of things and selves must depend upon its own originating 
and sustaining activity manifested in the world. 



BOOK II 

THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF REALITY— 
THE CATEGORIES 



CHAPTER IX 



WHAT ARE CATEGORIES 



Category means a fundamental form of predication or asser- 
tion. Every science and every principal form of man's reflective 
activity has its guiding categories. For example, we speak of the 
categories of physics, of biology, and of natural science in general ; 
of the categories of historical or social thought ; of the categories of 
literary and artistic interpretation; of the categories of moral, 
social and religious thought and practice. Philosophy, regarded as 
a criticism of the categories, is the enterprise of determining 
what are the fundamental categories for the interpretation of 
experience, and of organizing these fundamental categories into a 
coherent system. Philosophy inquires whether there are certain 
universals, or ultimate forms of predication, which apply to all 
types of existence ; how these ultimate forms are related and what 
positions and validity the special categories have in the whole 
system of the categorial interpretation of experience. For ex- 
ample, the categories of identity and diversity, quality and quan- 
tity, particularity, individuality and universality, substantiality, 
causality and community or reciprocity, are applicable to all sorts 
of empirical things; we can apply them all to rocks, plants, ani- 
mals, minds or planets. On the other hand the categories of end 
and value are not obviously applicable to the interpretation of 
physical things ; the applicability of the latter categories seems to 
imply the presence of minds or at least of organisms. We shall 
now consider the fundamental categories or primary universals. 

The primary categories are nonempirical conditions of em- 
pirical reality; nonempirical, not in the sense that they are not 
found in experience, but in the sense that their meanings and 
applications do not depend upon any specific set of empirical 
qualities, since they are applicable to every sort of empirical 
subject matter. (This, I take it, is what Kant meant when he said 
the categories were transcendental conditions of experience. They 

133 



134 MAN AND THE COSMOS 






transcend any experience, since they are presupposed in thinking 
all experience.) 

The categories are forms both of thought and of things. The 
mind is awakened to the use of them by the impact of experience. 
They are implicitly present in experience from its very beginning. 
Through the reflective organization of experience, the mind finds 
the categories in its world as the texture of relations which makes 
an ordered or significant experience. Thus, the mind neither 
invents the categories in a vacuum nor are they pitchforked into 
the mind by the senses. The ordering of experience is one aspect 
of a single process, of which the reflective organization of mind is 
the other aspect. If there were not a dynamic correspondence, a 
constant active intercourse of thought with the rest of reality, the 
categories would be a priori cobwebs, fictions spun by the mind out 
of its own inwards ; and the world experienced would not be a 
world but a chaos. In discussing the categories I shall therefore 
proceed upon the assumption of an active and successful corre- 
spondence of thought and reality. In other words my working 
hypothesis is that the more experience is categorized, the fuller 
the revelation of the nature of reality and of the correspondent 
nature of mind. This hypothesis, of course, implies that uni- 
versal are just as real as particulars, since categories are primary 
universals. Indeed it implies that reality is a universe or cosmos, 
an organic or systematic whole of particulars in relation. 1 

The most important systematic treatments of the categories in 
modern thought are probably still those of Kant and Hegel. The 
most thorough and instructive discussion of them in contemporary 
literature is, so far as I know, that of Mr. S. Alexander in Space, 
Time and Deity. For lack of space and time I shall make but 
scant reference to Mr. Alexander's fine work. My own standpoint 
is quite different from his, but I wish to say that no one can afford 
to consider seriously this subject, which is the very heart of meta- 
physics, without weighing carefully Mr. Alexander's treatment of 
the categories. 

Can we find a clew to the complete ordering of the categories ? 
Kant was misguided when he found the clew in the table of the 

1 This means, of course, a rejection of the Kantian doctrine of a noumenal 
reality distinct from the realm of phenomenal existence and to which the 
categories do not apply. In fact Kant failed to keep consistently to this 
distinction. 



WHAT ARE CATEGORIES? 135 

judgment forms of formal logic. His table of the categories is both 
redundant and incomplete. For example, categories of quality are 
repeated in the categories of modality. Identity and diversity, 
universality and particularity, receive no adequate treatment. 
Moreover Kant's categories remain functionless and inert in a high 
a priori vacuum until they are put to work in the schematism of 
the imagination. Hegel tried to derive all the categories by the 
immanent movement of the dialectic process, which process is for 
him the moving spirit of mind and of reality, since reality, as a 
whole, is the absolute, all-inclusive mind or individual. The 
moving principle is negation or contradiction; thus non-being is 
the negation, the complete opposite or contradictory, of being; 
therefore empty being is the same as non-being. Being, the thesis, 
and non-being, its antithesis, are synthesized in becoming. What 
Hegel really meant was that all real being is determinate being. 
Non-being is the bare negation of existence. To say that non-being 
is the same as being in general is a perverse way of saying that 
there is no being which is not some determinate kind of being. 
Hegel confuses contrary opposites with counterparts or differents. 
Identity and diversity, for instance, or wholeness and partness, or 
particularity and universality, are not contradictories but counter- 
parts. What Hegel's logic proves up to the hilt is, not that 
negativity or contradiction is the moving spring or reality and 
thought, but that every determinate being or existent implies an 
other. As Plato puts it, being partakes of the "same" and the 
"other." These communicate with one another. For example, 
yellow is neither spherical nor juicy, but in an orange each of these 
qualities, which is an other of the others, communicates with one 
another. An orange is not an orange tree ; the tree is an other of 
the other, that is, the orange, but the tree and the orange are inter- 
dependent existents. Hegel has sufficiently demonstrated that 
reality must be a systematic totality of related elements, and not 
a chaos or mere aggregate. If the principle of negativity only 
means that the nature of any finite existent, when thought out to 
the end, implies that any existent exists only in relation to all other 
existents, and that the whole of existence is a system of related 
beings or elements, we may accept it. But negativity, in this 
i sense, is not contradiction, and we cannot by its aid derive all 
| categories from mere being. I shall attempt to show that the 
primary categories are interrelated, or communicate with one 



136 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

another. I shall also try to show that, if we start with the simplest 
category, that of quality, there is a development of categories in 
pairs which are united in higher categories until we come to the 
all-inclusive category, which for me is Order. We are to proceed 
from the simplest and poorest, in the sense of the least meaningful 
category to the most comprehensive category. 

It has become fashionable to say that, whereas particulars 
exist, universals subsist. If this distinction means that universals 
have a pervasive and permanent sort of being in contrast with the 
local and temporary being of the particulars which they relate, 
it is useful. If it means that subsistence is some ghostly sort of 
being apart from the concrete reality of experience, I can find 
neither sense nor use in the distinction. The subsistence of uni- 
versals means to me their substantial existence — that they are the 
all pervading and ever permanent warp of reality to which 
empirical particulars are the woof. 

I shall consider, in the following eight chapters, the meanings 
of the principal categories of philosophical thinking in their appli- 
cations and their mutual relationships. I shall begin with the 
simplest categories — those of quality. 



CHAPTEE X 

LIKENESS AND UNLIKENESS, IDENTITY AND DIVEESITY 

The qualities of experience, which are the raw material of our 
knowledge of reality, the immediate stuff of reality, are given 
through the senses. Colors, shapes, massiveness, temperatures, 
tastes, smells, kinesthetic qualities, pleasantness and unpleasant- 
ness — all these and other qualities are irreducible sensa data or 
sense of reality. Other beings with sensory equipments other than 
ours would have different data of reality. For example, a dog's 
world is doubtless largely made up of smells. 

For human beings, then, the immediate stuff of reality consists 
only of the qualities sensed and felt. We cannot explain why we 
have just these and no more sense qualities ; but the mind no sooner 
begins to take note of them than it notes that there are degrees and 
hinds of likeness and unliJceness, The various colors, for example, 
are alike in that they are colors. So color is a kind. Colors and 
sounds are so unlike that they are different kinds, although the 
fact of colored audition, if it be a fact, suggests that possibly they 
are not absolutely different kinds. However, for the normal mind 
the various types of sensation do appear to be different kinds. 
Color does not become sound or taste nor vice versa. On the other 
hand, a light differs from another light, a sound from another 
sound, an acrid taste from another acrid taste, in degree or in- 
tensity ; thus unlikeness of degree differs from unlikeness of kind. 
For the comparison of sense qualities with respect to degrees and 
kinds of likeness and unlikeness arise the categories of identity 
and diversity, both qualitative and quantitative. From these arise, 
in turn, the categories of unity and plurality, wholeness and part- 
ness, continuity and discreteness, substance and individuality. 

Likeness is partial identity of quality ; that is, generic identity. 
A kind or class means more than one instance of a type of existent 
which constitutes a kind, by virtue of either a single qualitative 
similarity or a complex of similar qualities. Red or green are 

137 



138 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

instances of simple kinds, dog or man of complex kinds. In brief 
a simple likeness, such as a color, spatial form, odor or taste, is the 
basis of a simple kind ; a complex likeness is made up of a com- 
bination of simple likenesses, as for example — orange, apple or 
dog. The ultimately simple kinds are based on the not-further 
analyzable differences of quality. It is difficult to say what are 
simple qualities ; for example, is red really a simple kind or are 
all shades of red different simple kinds? When we say that a 
thing is in a class by itself we mean that there is only one instance 
of the kind, and strictly speaking we are dealing not with an 
instance of a kind but with a unique individual. 1 

The distinction of degrees within the same qualitative or 
generic likeness is the work of the category of intensive magnitude. 
It has been denied by some that intensive magnitudes, such as 
lights, sounds, or pleasures and pains, are commensurable. But 
surely we can note and compare differences of intensity ! If one 
light is brighter than another and the latter than a third, if one 
pleasure is keener than another and the latter than a third, surely 
we are measuring lights and pleasures in terms of a qualitatively 
identical scale. And that is what we do when we measure lengths 
and weights. It is assumed tacitly by those who admit commen- 
surability in the latter cases, and deny it in the former, that in the 
latter cases alone we have absolute fixity of scale; but in neither 
case do we have absolute fixity. Measures of length and mass vary 
too; only they vary less than measures of light or pleasure-pain, 
since the data of sight and touch are relatively more constant than 
the data of light and affection. 

The categories of number and of spatial relationships are 
based on the recognition of existential identity and diversity. 
Because there are empirically different qualities and complexes of 
qualities which occupy distinct positions in space and time (dis- 
tinct point-instants) we count, and because distinct particulars or 
positions persist or endure together we relate them in space and 
we enumerate them. Because qualitatively distinct positions suc- 
ceed one another in time we order them ; through superposition we 
measure spatial magnitudes; through direction or "sense," in its 
mathematical meaning, the recognition of which involves time, we 

1 Ultimately, only the whole system of the universe ean be a wholly unique 
individual. Such is the absolute in the philosophy of Messrs. Bradley and 
Bosanquet. 



LIKENESS AND UNLIKENESS 139 

recognize spatial relations. A numerical series is a temporal order 
of direction regarded as enduring in space. All our most complex 
and abstruse theorems in regard to number, magnitude and quan- 
tity have their roots in the empirical facts of the occupation of 
space in successive moments of time by particular qualities and 
complexes of qualities. I have neither the time nor the capacity 
to show in detail how this is so, but I may sum up the foregoing 
matter as follows. Simple or complex likenesses of qualitative 
particulars occupying distinct positions in space and time are the 
basis of all generic relations or class universals. The empirical 
differences of particulars are the basis of number and quantity. 
The empirical relations of simultaneous and successive existents 
are the basis of all relating through unity, plurality and totality. 

The category of whole and part deserves some mention. The 
empirical basis of wholeness is the continuity of our spatial posi- 
tions in time ; in other words, the original of wholeness is a spatial 
order that endures unchanged in a succession of temporal 
moments. We derive partness from the fact that we recognize 
distinct qualities and groups of qualities as permanently occupying 
distinctive positions in succeeding moments of time. Of course 
we distinguish between the wholeness of a spatial continuum and 
the wholeness of an organism or mind, since the parts of the 
organism and still more of the mind more intimately pervade the 
whole than the point-instants of space and time pervade the whole 
of space and time. Thus the problem arises as to whether an 
organism, a person or a society of persons, are adequately con- 
ceived in terms of whole and part. I do not think they are, but 
this is a matter for discussion later. I am concerned now only to 
insist that the original of the category of whole and part is to be 
found in the experience of space-time as a continuum which in- 
cludes sensory or qualitative distinctions and relations. 2 

The category of identity and its correlative diversity are used 
in equivocal and misleading senses. We must distinguish between 
generic and existential identity. If two particulars were abso- 

2 My colleague, Dr. A. E. Chandler, comments as follows: "Taken intro- 
spectively, music furnishes simultaneous wholes without spatiality,- it fur- 
nishes 'sense' as one tone above another in pitch, without temporal succession 
or space arrangement. The spatiality comes in through the empathetic kin- 
aesthetic sensations and images aroused. " I am unable to separate, in my own 
introspection, the kinesthetic factors from the pure music; but then I am a 
''duffer" in regard to music and he may very well be right. If so, there 
is an empirical instance of whole-part relation without space or time elements. 



140 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

lutely identical in quality and duration they would not be two, as 
Leibniz pointed out in his principle of the identity of indiscern- 
ibles. Existential identity means the same as numerical identity, 
and the minimum meaning of numerical identity is existence in 
at least one moment of time at some point in space. Thus, as Mr. 
Alexander argues so effectively, reality in its poorest terms consists 
at least of point instants or event particles ; that is, of events that 
occupy positions in space. Moreover, in order that an existent 
may be identified it must exist for at least two moments of time at 
a point in space, or in two moments of time occupy two related 
points in space. Every position in space occupies time and every 
instant of time is located in space. Time and space, as we shall 
see later on, are interdependent totalities. They are not class- 
universals, in the generally accepted sense of the term, but wholes. 
An existent is identical with itself only in so far as it is different 
from other existents, and vice versa. As Plato put it, the same 
and the other are in communication; or, as Hegel argued ad 
nauseam, the same is the other of the other. In short, all existents 
are elements in the systematic totality of being. Reality is a whole 
made up of parts in relation ; the parts are the particular existents ; 
the relations are the universals by which the particulars have mem- 
bership in the whole. Thus the consideration of identity and 
diversity leads us into the consideration of particular, universal 
and individual, unity and plurality, continuity and discreteness, 
substance, causality and reciprocity, and finally into that of the 
structure or order of the universe. Before we take up these con- 
cepts it is desirable to clear up a confusion in regard to identity 
and diversity which is found in the literature of so-called absolute 
idealism. 

In the writings of Messrs. Bradley, and other idealists I find 
a subtle fallacy, which consists in arguing from the interrelated- 
ness of all existents to their existential identity. All existents are 
determinate and all determination involves relation, but it does not 
follow that the relatedness of all existents makes them parts of one 
being that is both numerically and qualitatively self-identical. 
Suppose we assume that there are an indefinite number of empir- 
ically distinct point-instants, that all these are empirically distinct 
centers of quality; suppose we assume further that some of these 
centers have the qualities of vitality and sentience. Let us grant 
further that all our assumed centers are in interaction and inter- 



LIKENESS AND UNLIKENESS 141 

passion ; in other words that they are interdependent parts of one 
whole — the universe. Let us assume further that the highest con- 
ception we can frame of a whole is that of a mind or experience, 
does it follow that the universe must be one mind or experience ? 
Is it not illegitimate to argue from the systematic character of 
reality as a whole to the conclusion that reality as a whole is both 
generically and numerically one self-identical individual ? I shall 
urgue later on for the doctrine that the various orders in reality 
constitute a hierarchy which probably has its ground in a supreme 
principle of order. This position does not imply that all existence 
is both qualitatively and numerically one. 

The problem of identity and diversity has thus carried us into 
the very heart of metaphysics, which is the question of the right 
relation of the one and the many — of the universe and its mem- 
bers. In recent philosophy this question has taken the form — are 
relations and relata independent of one another ? Before I discuss 
this question, it is desirable to consider the relations of quantity 
and quality. 



CHAPTEK XI 

QUANTITY AND QUALITY 

Since our purpose here is to consider the metaphysical relations 
of quantity and quality, it is not necessary to enter, at any length, 
into the problems of logistic or mathematical philosophy. 1 

Number and spatial magnitude are the two fundamental forms 
of quantity. They originated in man's practical desire to count 
his possessions, to measure land, and to weigh things. Number 
and magnitude seem, at first blush, to be as different as time and 
space. Indeed, the very notion of number involves the recognition 
of a temporal series; counting is stringing together, in the con- 
sciousness of an orderly series, discrete moments. The notion of 
magnitude involves the simultaneous existence and persistence of 
extended parts; a bulk or mass consists of co-existing positions 
which resist occupation by anything else. But, we shall see later, 
space and time are interdependent aspects of the perceptual world. 
The measurement of magnitude involves number, and the enumer- 
ation of things involves spatial reference. Indeed, while arithme- 
tic and geometry at first may have developed more or less apart 
from one another, the progress of higher mathematics has been in 
the arithmetizing of geometry. Pythagoras appears to have begun 
this work, and, in the course of it, to have discovered the incom- 
mensurability, in terms of natural numbers, of the side and the 
diagonal of a square. This difficulty led to the invention of irra- 
tional numbers. Coordinate geometry and the calculus were two 
great steps in the arithmetizing of spatial magnitude and motion 
— that is, in the expression of continuous wholes in terms of dis- 
crete magnitudes. 

Kant said that number arose from the consciousness of the 

1 On the latter subject, see : B. Eussell, Introduction to Mathematical Phi- 
losophy; A. N. Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics; Whitehead and 
Eussell, Principles of Mathematics; L. Couturat, The Algebra of Logic; P. 
Natorp, Die Logischen Grundlagen der Exdkten Wissenschaften ; H. PoincarS, 
Science et Methode. 

142 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY 143 

repetition of acts of attention; in other words from counting 
things. This idea has been criticized, on the ground that it is 
circular, and that number can be considered apart from the act of 
enumeration. 2 Number is denned by Eussell, following Erege, as 
follows: "A number is anything which is the number of some 
class" ; and, "The number of a class is the class of all classes which 
are similar to it"; "similarity consists of one-one correspondence 
between the classes"; thus all couples, trios, etc., are in one-one 
relation. Number thus is defined in terms of classes and one-one 
correspondence. I do not question the value of this definition, but 
it presupposes number and implies enumeration and is circular. 
For "class" implies individual members or particulars which have 
the similarity of being grouped together as sharing in a common 
relation. Every definition of number is circular, and we really 
define it by pointing to it. 

Number is essentially, in origin, a discrete order, or one-in- 
many. It involves the consciousness of a succession of acts of 
attention. Unity is an abstraction from the recognition of identity 
in things and in the self for which things are identical ; plurality 
or manyness is an abstraction from the consciousness of a com- 
munity of relation among distinct identities, by virtue of which 
they can be grouped together into classes. At first one thing was 
something which responded in some fashion to a single interest; 
things which responded to several interests were several; several 
things which responded to a common interest were one-in-many, 
were, in short, a number-group. Thus the notion of number arose 
from the recognition of identity and community or class-relation. 
A group is an assemblage of objects bound together by a common 
interest for the grouper; whether it be a group of rational, ir- 
rational or transfinite numbers, or a group of dogs or sheep, or 
a group of things whose only common feature is that they are 
owned by the grouper. Thus cardinal number is derived from 
ordinal number, and the latter is the abstract or symbolical ex- 
pression of the consciousness of the orderly series of thought in 
repeating and summating units or identical entities. Enumera- 
tion is the conscious synthesis of the series of acts involved in 
i adding and subtracting units. All operations with numbers imply 

l 2 See, B. Eussell, Our Knowledge of the External World, pp. 187-189; and 
[ Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, chap. 2; J. W. Young, Fundamental 
.Concepts of Algebra and Geometry, p. 64 ff. 



144 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the judgments : there are particulars or units and there are 
identical relations between these. In dealing with pure number 
and quantity we abstract almost entirely from the qualitative 
heterogeneities of the objects of thought ; I say "almost entirely," 
since there would be no meaning in enumeration, or any other 
operation with number, if we did not recognize the distinctness 
or particularity of each symbol and its corresponding act of atten- 
tion. Just as in determining how many sheep one owns one can 
ignore their respective sizes, colors and sexes, whereas for purposes 
of breeding or marketing one cannot ignore those differences, so 
in purely arithmetical and algebraic operations, one considers 
each symbol only as the sign of an act of thought. What cannot 
be ignored, if number and numerical operations are to mean any- 
thing definite, is that a number is a discrete moment in an order 
series. Thus a number series is the most abstract symbolical ex- 
pression of a temporal order, just as measurements of spatial mag- 
nitude are the most abstract expressions of spatial order. Of 
course the symbols which represent the number series can be seen 
or thought as existing simultaneously or in space. Whether we 
can count without imagining movement in space (M. Bergson says 
that we cannot, and Mr. Eussell that we can), at any rate we can 
apply number to space, and we do measure in time. 

The invention of symbols for whole numbers, fractions, nega- 
tive, irrational and complex numbers, has made possible notable 
advances in number theory, and in the applications of mathematics 
to practical problems. Number is objective as an expression of 
the objective constitution of thought. The most complex number 
series, assemblages and groups, the whole development of modern 
number theory, is a beautiful example of the fact that thought 
has a determinate constitution. Starting out from specific defi- 
nitions and assumptions it finds definite logical consequences to 
follow from its starting points. Thus pure mathematics becomes 
identical with symbolical or purely formal logic. Its entire su- 
perstructure is built on the consequences that follow from the na- 
ture of its symbols and assumptions. The universal nature of 
thought, to which we must conform if we wish to think logically, 
is revealed in pure mathematics which is the play of pure thought 
conducted according to the rules of the game. 3 

•But when we are told that there are transfinite numbers, or infinite 
number in which a part is equal to the whole, or in which the addition or 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY 145 

A number series that was an absolute continuum would be 
as senseless as a sand-rope series ; for the essence of every number 
series is that it is a discrete series. In this, the simplest and most 
fundamental form of human thinking, is expressed the basic prob- 
lem that lies at the heart of all human thinking and intelligent 
action — the problem of the relation between the discrete or par- 
ticular and the continuous or total. If we ask what is the rela- 
tion between identity and diversity, the many and the one, the 
particular and the universal, the individual and the social order, 
personality and the universe, the changing and the permanent; 
we are posing special aspects and phases of the one fundamental 
question — how to reconcile discreteness and continuity, individ- 
uality and order, in theory, practice, or contemplative vision. 
Pythagoras was not so far astray when he said that numbers are 
the essences of things. The final question of all philosophical 
theory is the meaning of order; the bottom problem of the prac- 
tical life of the human person is the true nature of social order; 



subtraction of a number makes no difference to the size of the number, 
that is to the number of units contained in it we are asked to abandon the 
notion of number in its usual meaning. If mathematics be not the science 
of number and quantity, then it is high time that some other name were found 
for the latter science. Inasmuch as, historically and by general social usage, 
mathematics is the science of number and quantity, it seems to me that it 
would be much less confusing and misleading to call the new science logistic 
or symbolic logic. I am unable to understand a number that is a part of 
another number and yet is equal in number to that number of which it is a part. 
With all due admiration for the profoundity and ingenuity of Messrs. 
Cantor, Dedekind, Bussell, et al., it seems to me that their transfinites, in- 
finites contained within infinites without number, but in which the containers 
and contained are equal because they are in one-one correspondence, their 
continuities which are not continuous since number is essentially discrete, have 
contributed to obfuscation of thought concerning mathematics and number 
and quantity. Numbers have functioned in the history of culture as, discrete 
symbolic expressions for discrete series of acts of thought, by which things 
of all sorts can be enumerated or added and substracted, by which men can 
carry on barter and can better operate on the physical conditions of life; 
and which, beyond these practical uses, afford the human mind opportunity 
for the development of precise and rigorous habits of thinking. The con- 
fusion between the older science of number and quantity and the new theories 
of the infinite and of a mathematics which dispenses with enumeration and 
quantity, and thus becomes a purely abstract and formal logic of terms, 
propositions and relations, lends color to Mr. Russell 's definition — "Mathe- 
matics is the science in which we never know what we are talking about, nor 
whether what we say is true" (Mysticism and Logic, p. 75). Mr. Russell identi- 
fies mathematics with formal logic. It deals entirely with hypothetical propo- 
sitions and sheds no light on the nature of the actual world. "Geometry 
throws no light on the nature of space/' and, I am tempted to add, the 
new infinite throws no light oh the nature of number. (See Appendix to 
Chap. 35, "On the Infinite.") 



ve- 



146 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

in both fields the concept of order is the solution of the question 

as to the right relation between the discrete and the continuous, 
the individual and the universe; the practical question is insolu- 
ble, if the philosophical foundations be ignored. (The chief 
trouble with civilization to-day is that neither those who are try- 
ing to alter it radically, nor those who wish to return to a "state 
of normalcy," have any thought-out philosophy. Until rulers 
become philosophers, righteousness will not prevail.) 

Quantity is a relation. It depends upon quality, which is 
the stuff of reality. Number implies that there are particular 
identities, self-identical things, so that each is a unit or contains 
the unit. Any number is defined by its place in a number system. 
Thus numbers are symbols of sets of logical relations. Spatial 
magnitude is the relation of a given spatial configuration or bit 
of space to conventionally established units of length, area, volume. 
The same holds true of weight and mass. In every case a quantity 
is the relation of given simple qualities such as extensity, mov6 
ment and mass, in a conventionalized system of relations. Evei 
actual quantity is relative to a system and every system is a con- 
vention. All quantitative relations are based on comparisons of 
quality; for example, the measurement of lengths and areas pre- 
supposes sameness of extensive quality; and empirical extensity 
is a simple quality, like color or sound. More and less, in degrees 
of intensive magnitude, are simple cases of comparison of differ- 
ences in the same quality. Thus two extensive magnitudes are 
greater and less, respectively, because they are differences in the 
same quality; extensities differ in intensive magnitude, and vice 
versa. Spread a color or a sound over a larger area and it be- 
comes thinner or weaker in intensity; condense it and it becomes 
more intense. Extensity and intensity, the spatial and temporal 
factors of experience, are inseparable. But quantity is a relation 
of quality. Therefore, only in so far as there is homogeneity of 
quality between them can things be measured in the strict sense. 
Colors cannot be measured in terms of sound, nor pleasures in 
terms of spatial extensity. We may say, figuratively, that one 
pleasure is more voluminous than another, but we cannot compare 
them in terms of cubic centimeters. Intelligences can be meas- 
ured in terms of other intelligences, but not in terms of physical 
extent or weight. In so far as spatial extensity is homogeneous 
we can compare and measure its parts, by putting one alongside, 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY 147 

upon, or inside another. This can be done because extensity is 
persistent. But we cannot, in the same manner, measure qualities 
which are essentially temporal ; such as pleasures or psychical 
values. In so far as experiential or lived time is heterogeneous 
we cannot compare exactly its successive moments. We measure 
lived time only by distorting it into rhythmical space-movements ; 
thus reducing the heterogeneity of experienced change to the 
homogeneity of repeated identical movements in space. Meas- 
urement of the living succession of experiences assumes that all 
change or duration is a succession of generically identical mo- 
ments, which is not true. If the successive moments of experi- 
enced duration or change were really identical in character, there 
would be no recognition of change. To M. Bergson belongs the 
merit of having brought this truth out clearly, in the first two 
chapters of Time and Free Will, although it has been known since 
Leibniz. 

All precise measurement presupposes that the parts of space 
measured differ only in relative positions and extents; and 
ignores the question whether differences of position and extent 
can coexist without further qualitative differences. Empirically 
there are no pure positions, areas, lengths and volumes. From 
the point of view of concrete experience all measurements must 
be regarded as useful fictions; the fundamental positions and 
volumes are qualitatively diverse and ever changing. Reality 
consists of groupings of unique qualitative positions or event- 
particles, and quantitative comparisons are skeletal schemes of 
their relations. I do not mean that the relations are unreal, but 
that the empirical complexes of qualities are substantive whereas 
the relations are transitive. I employ the word "transitive" here 
in the sense in which James uses it ; namely, the substantive ele- 
ments in experience consist of the resting places of thought, 
the relata or transitive elements, consist of the transitions. In 
the terminology of the newer logic only those relations are transi- 
tive by which one can pass from one term to another through the 
mediation of a third; for example, if A implies B and B implies 
C in the same system of relations then the relation is transitive 
since A implies C. There is danger of confusion in the use of the 
phrase "transitive relation." James uses it as a term of psycho- 
logical description for the passage of the mind ; the new logic uses 
it as the basis of true inference in place of the Dictum de omni 



e 

: 



; 



148 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

et nullo. Obviously the latter usage involves the problem of the 
metaphysical status of relations, which I consider in Chapters XI! 
and XIV. 

While the extensity-faetor of experiences is the only one tha 
can be directly measured, since only extensity can be accurately 
matched with extensity, the other qualities of experience can be 
measured indirectly, by comparison. Even pleasures and pains 
and other emotional processes can be compared with respect to 
their intensities and durations. Thus, while the intensity of 
psychical processes are not measurable in terms of spatial units, 
and while as numerical units no two of them need be exactly alib 
and therefore they furnish no units of measurement within thei 
own kind, they are comparable and, thus far, measurable. There 
are changes in the qualitative characters of psychical processes 
which are in one-one correspondence with quantitative changes 
in the stimuli; colors and sounds change in quality with changes 
in the rate and amplitude of the motion of their physical occa- 
sions ; so do tastes and smells ; pleasures and pains vary with the 
intensity factors of the stimuli. The Weber-Fechner law of the 
relation between intensity of stimulation and of sense-experience 
is an attempt to generalize these facts. Its interpretation is dis- 
puted and we need not discuss the point here, beyond saying that 
its meaning is probably chiefly physiological, although attention 
lowers the threshold of consciousness for sensations. Our very 
feeling of personal identity, our central mass of systemic feeling 
or coensesthesis, is changed by the alteration of the fundamental 
rhythms of our bodily life, such as the rate of the heartbeat, 
breathing, etc. Since the empirical qualities of both our per- 
ceptual world and our felt selfhood change with changes in the 
velocities of physical stimuli, why not go farther, as a material- 
istic metaphysic does, and say that all the qualitative diversities 
of the empirical world are nothing but differences in the spatial 
configurations and velocities of the motions of mass particles ? To 
do this is to reduce the empirical world to variations in the 
spatial relations of elements possessing no other qualitative dis- 
tinctions than, let us say, differences in electric sign and mass. 
This is the ideal of quantitative science, expressed in Lord Kel- 
vin's saying: "What we can measure, we can know." On which 
I would comment that, from the point of view of totality, meas- 
urement gives only the bare bones of reality. The most significant 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY 149 

and worthful qualities of experience we cannot measure directly, 
but we do know them. All differences of quality are not reduci- 
ble to differences of extensive and vector quantity. The world 
of living experience has many unique and absolute differences of 
quality and hence of value — of pleasure, pain, happiness, sorrow, 
beauty, grandeur, terror, love, joy. 

Experience is the primary reality, and in it we cannot pass 
from one order of quality to another without taking account both 
of the qualitative complexity of the experient, which is for us 
an ultimate or primary fact, as well as of qualitative differences 
in the stimuli. Nature apart from the percipient is not of one 
quality, or even a few. The percipient is a specific and complex 
reactor. Even in the same order, for example, in colors, sounds 
or tastes, each discriminable experience is qualitatively unique. 
We cannot always say how much of this uniqueness is to be at- 
tributed to the percipient and how much to differences in the 
stimulating media. And, certainly, in the inner or feeling life 
of the percipient each experience is unique; here, as everywhere, 
only differents are comparable. Similarities, comparisons in 
degree and kind, are relative and vary, according to the stand- 
point and purpose of the comparer. 

To reduce all differences of quality to differences of quantity 
would be to eliminate all substantive elements from experience, 
and, with them, the experient himself. But the human self, the 
living experient, is a creative organism, which educes from the 
microscopic mechanisms of the physical world, as conceived by 
the scientist, all the rich and multiform and tingling variety — 
shapes, colors, sounds, tastes, odors, beauties, grandeurs, friend- 
linesses and terrors — which it perceives in nature. Walter Pater 
says, "Color is a spirit upon things by which they become expres- 
sive to the spirit." 4 Every quality that man perceives in nature 
is a spirit upon things by which they become expressive to his 
spirit. And a nature that is thus expressive to the spirit, and 
which we may well believe has many more capacities of expres- 
sion to the spirit attuned thereto (as, indeed, we know, in the 
case of poet, artist and nature-lover) is not a skeleton or frame- 
work of quantitative relations which the spirit of man drapes 



4 if 



Essays on the Eenaissanee, ' ' p. 63, quoted by Mr. Bosanquet, Principle 
of Individuality and Value, p. 63. 



150 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

with hallucinatory garments and endows with an illusory life. 
The wealth of empirical qualities which the spirit of man educes 
from a nature responsive to his nature must be expressive of a 
qualitative wealth and variety of activity and life in a universe 
that is richer, not poorer, than nature as man perceives and 
images it. Quantity is relation — a relation of order and mag- 
nitude among realities that are revealed as energy and life in the 
substantive qualities of experience. 



CHAPTEE XII 



RELATIONS 



The problem of relations has been a storm center in recent 
philosophy. The problem is this : What is the most intelligible or 
consistent conception of the relations between things or individua ? 
In the language of James, relations are commonly regarded as 
the trcmsitive parts of experience and things or existents as the 
substantive parts of experience. This is because the recognition 
of a relation involves a mental transition from one thing to an- 
other. In this mental transition we may misconceive the real 
relations between things ; but, inasmuch as every judgment in- 
volves a twofold relation, namely, the relation of things judged to 
be in relation to one another and the relation of the judging mind 
to the whole matter of the judgment, there can be truth only in 
so far as the second relation is the apprehension of the first 
relation. It follows that relations must be just as real as the 
things which they relate. Indeed, when we consider relations in 
themselves or in abstractor as universals, they seem much more 
permanent than things. Things may come and things may go 
but relations go on forever. Aboveness, belowness, greaterness, 
equality, beforeness, afterness, causality, wholeness, partness, 
paternity, ownership, lovingness, etc. — such universals are rela- 
tions which appear to have an eternally subsistent being apart 
from the muddy and transitory stuff of empirical existents be- 
tween which they hold. In view of the difficulties involved in 
forming an intelligible conception of the world as a system or 
totality of existents in relation, the easiest solution might appear 
to be the doctrine that things or existents and relations are wholly 
external to one another — that relations "subsist" eternally, like the 
Platonic Ideas in the common version, and that particular 
existents come and go, enter into and pass out of relations, without 
their natures being changed. Such is the doctrine of logical 
pluralism or logical atomism. 

151 



152 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

I shall maintain the doctrine that relations have only a mental 
existence apart from things, and that in reality things exist only 
in relation and relations are real only between things. In other 
words, reality is a systematic whole of existents in multitudinous 
relations. A thing is neither the mere sum of its relations nor 
something indifferent to its relations. There are relations which 
are irrelevant, or extrinsic, as Mr. S. Alexander puts it, to the 
nature of the existents, so far as we can see. For example, it is 
irrelevant to my nature, so far as I know, just how many particles 
of dust there are in the atmosphere of Sirius, if Sirius have an 
atmosphere. On the other hand, my family, community, cultural, 
and professional relations are very relevant to my nature. L 
other such relations, I would be other than I am, and if I wer( 
other than I am, I would be in other such relations. No existent 
could exist out of the relations in which it exists and continue 
to be itself. All things are related in some way, but not every- 
thing equally to everything else. Some relations between existents 
are negligible, when we are considering the natures of the exist- 
ents, and there are many degrees of relevancy in relations. It 
is not very relevant to the nature of my pipe whether it is now 
on my desk or in my pocket, but it is relevant to its nature 
whether it is often alight and filled with tobacco and in my mouth. 
The world contains an indefinite plurality of existents in an in- 
definite multitude of relations of varying degrees of intimacy. 
There are static relations in space, dynamic relations in space and 
time, relations of value between sentient beings and their physical 
and social environments, affectional and moral relations between 
selves in society, etc. All relevant relations are dynamic, that 
is, they involve transactions between the things related. All things 
have at least spatial and temporal relations. Such relations may 
or may not be relevant to the nature of the things — for instance 
I do not know whether the fact that the flavor of champagne and 
the square root of minus one are both constituents of this spatial 
and temporal world means that they have any relevant relation- 
ship, but I do know that there is a relevant relationship between 
the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States 
and the flavor of champagne — to wit, the flavor of champagne is 
vanishing with the champagne. 

There are two alternatives to the doctrine that the real world 
consists of dynamic things in dynamic relations. These are: (1) 



RELATIONS 153 

the singularistic or monistic doctrine that all relations are more or 
less illusory appearances and that reality consists of one super- 
relational being, the absolute; and (2) the pluralistic doctrine that 
reality is not a system or cosmos at all, but that it consists of a 
collection of various things and various relations that have being 
independent of one another ; in short, is a multitude of Leibnizian 
monads without the preestablished harmony. 

Thus, the problem of relations brings to a head the funda- 
mental issue that lives at the roots of all metaphysical questions, 
that is basic to the problem of the place of personality in the world 
order — in what sense is the world of reality one or a universe? 
Is our so-called universe merely an aggregate or collection of 
various entities, as the extreme pluralist holds ? Is it ultimately 
one being inclusive of everything real, as the extreme singularist 
holds ? Or is it a system or order of elements in relation ; and, if 
so, in what sort or sorts of ultimate relation? Using the term 
"entity" for whatsoever may be a constituent of reality, and the 
term "relation" for all sorts of connections between entities, I 
shall now discuss this problem. 

Modern metaphysical idealism or spiritualism, since Fichte 
and Hegel, has for the most part been singularistic or numerically 
monistic. Indeed singularistic or monistic idealism goes back to 
Spinoza, the first great singularist of modern philosophy. Sin- 
gularistic idealism or spiritualism argues that, since everything 
finite is, both with respect to its being known and its existence, 
related to, and therefore dependent upon, an other-than-itself ; 
therefore all finite entities can exist only as members of a single 
all-including whole — the many can exist as many only in the one, 
the difTerents or others can be a system only if they are constituents 
of the unity. Therefore the only alternative to chaos, the only way 
in which we can get a cosmos, is to suppose that the whole system 
of real entities is, ultimately regarded, one perfect all-inclusive 
being. And the only adequate sample or type of such being is to 
be found in a mind, self or personality; or, at least (as Bradley 
puts it) a perfect experience. Singularistic idealists are not 
agreed as to whether the absolute one can be considered a self- 
conscious self or personality. They are agreed that it is of the 
nature of mind ; since in Mind is to be found the only true type of 
unity-expressing-and-realizing-itself-in-a-system-of-differences, and 
maintaining its oneness in the whole related system of mutually 



154 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

complementary and conditioning finite others. 1 I need not ex- 
pound this argument further, since I shall recur to it later, in 
discussing the nature of consciousness. 

The pluralist denies the validity of this argumentation. The 
neorealistic pluralist, in particular, calls in question the validity 
of the argument from the ubiquity of the knowledge relation (the 
egocentric predicament) ; namely, that, since everything known 
is in relation to a knower, therefore to say anything about anything 
or about everything we must admit that its being is dependent on 
a knower or mind. If this argument be invalid, then entities may 
be in all sorts of relation without their totalness being dependent 
on a mind. If knowing need make no difference to the existence 
of the entities known, then the latter may constitute some sort of 
universe or system without the system being mind-constituted or 
dependent. The relations between things are just as much natural 
facts as the empirical qualities of the things. No one type of 
relation can be regarded as ultimately constitutive of the char- 
acter of the cosmos. 

It follows that no one type of finite existence can be regarded 
as furnishing an adequate example for interpreting the nature of 
the cosmos. In fact, the cosmos cannot have a homogeneous 
nature; it must be a plurality of existents with a plurality of 
qualities ; it cannot be either one self or experience, or a society of 
selves. The neo-realistic pluralisms contentions, if accepted, 
negative both singularistic or monistic and personalistic or plural- 
istic spiritualism. 2 The doctrines of Hegel, Leibniz and Berkeley 
are equally untenable. Keality must consist of many kinds of 
entity in many kinds of relationship. 

The central and critical tenet of extreme pluralism is that 
entities and relations are independently real — have being external 
to one another. For, once we grant that entities can stand in no 
relations without thereby suffering modification, we have com- 
mitted ourselves either to a chaotic doctrine of reality or to a line 
of reasoning that will land us in some form of singularistic ideal- 
ism if we go through to the end. Neither materialism nor dualism 

1 Such is the general line of argumentation in Fiehte, Hegel, Green, 
Bradley, E. Caird, Bosanquet and Koyce. A neat condensation thereof will 
be found in M. W. Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, 3d Edi- 
tion, pp. 417-456, cf. also Taylor's Elements of Metaphysics, Chap. 2. 

2 For reasons which I will state presently, I regard singularistic or mon- 
istic personal idealism as a contradictio in adjecto. 



RELATIONS 155 

can afford us a coherent conception of how the many can be many 
entities and yet be elements in one organic or hyperorganic system 
— materialism cannot, since it must oscillate between a chaotic 
atomism and a continnism in which all differences of quality and 
individuality are wiped out; dualism cannot, since, by its very 
terms, the universe is cut in two with a hatchet. 

The pluralist contends that, fundamentally, there are two kinds 
of being, differing with respect to their logical and epistemological 
status — concrete entities or particulars, which exist; and univer- 
sal or generals, which subsist or are valid. All relations, taken as 
such, are universals. Thus, for example, likeness, equality, great- 
erness, lessness, wholeness, partness, rightness, leftness, have sub- 
sistent being apart from the concrete existents that are like, equal, 
greater, less, whole, part, right, left, in relation to other entities. 
The concrete existents may, as known or experienced, enter into 
such relations as the above are examples of, and thus be qualified 
by the subsistent universals in question; and may in turn make 
their exit from the relations, without having their natures modi- 
fied thereby. The existents retain, through all the changes and 
chances of their mortal lives as known, their existent being, and 
the universals retain their subsistent being, no matter what they 
qualify. They suffer no sea change "into something rich and 
strange/' by becoming or ceasing to be objects of experience. 3 
Since, then, experience or knowing makes no difference to the 
natures of many of its objects, the ground is cut from under all 
philosophies that would build up a theory of reality by an analysis 
and re-synthesis of the nature of experience, as belonging to an 
experient, at the very start. The objective idealist is knocked 
clean off his pins. He is left without even one leg to stand on. 
(Neorealistic pluralism harks back to Plato, for its august 
parentage. Whether its claim is legitimate I cannot here discuss. ) 

It is self-evident to me that relations or universals can have no 
subsistent (or any other sort of) being, in abstraction or separation 
from concrete reality, except as thoughts in some mind. Apart 
from concrete physical reality, on the one hand, and minds, on 
the other hand, they have not even ghostly subsistence; for there 
is nothing for them to subsist on or in. Universals exist in reality 

'Professor Spaulding explains how this proposition or thesis is established 
by analysis in situ.- I have neither the temerity nor the space to state his 
explanation. I refer the reader to his The New Rationalism, passim. 



156 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

only as the texture of connections among concrete entities. They 
are simply the ways in which existents resemble and differ, quali- 
tatively and quantitatively, act on and suffer from one another. 
It is equally self-evident to me that no concrete existent can 
exist absolutely out of relation to, and independent of, all others ; 
except the whole universe of reality which, by definition or con- 
ception being the totality of being, is the self-existent totality of 
existents-in-relation, to which all existents-in-relation ? and, there- 
fore, all entities and relations are internal. 

But is it, therefore, necessary to conclude that there must be 
one ground or medium of all relations between finite entities ? Is 
it not sufficient to suppose that the systematic, coherent or orderly 
character of the cosmos (in so far as there is a cosmos, since we do 
not know how much cosmos or order there may ultimately be) is 
due simply to the fact that the many existents which make up the 
universe are in all sorts of relations to one another ? Do we need 
any more unity than that of changing, growing and, perhaps in 
spots, decaying, immediate rapports between elemental existents ? 
Why hypostatize unity? There are all sorts and degrees of 
relationship discovered and discoverable in the factual world. 
Why not follow the law of parsimony and rest satisfied with these, 
thus admitting that our so-called universe is partially a multiverse, 
that it is a whole, not in itself, but only for a finite totalizing mind, 
a collection only for the collector and not in itself — one subject of 
discourse but not one-being-in-itself . 

This much seems to me certain — the progress of the mind in 
successful knowing and practical activity refute the doctrine that 
things and relations are mutually external to, or independent of, 
one another. Cognition and action are transactions of the self, as 
a member of a system or cosmos, with other members of the system. 
So much stands fast, whatever be the most plausible interpretation 
of the nature and meaning of the whole system ; whether it be life, 
mind or a system of mass-particles. Relations express and realize 
the natures of things, and the natures of things do not exist out of 
relations. There is a multiplicity of orders of relation between 
things, and there may be a plurality of qualitatively distinct types 
of existence, but no thing has any real existence apart from its 
relations, and no relations really exist otherwise than as transac- 
tions between things. The nature of a thing cannot be conceived 
apart from its position and connections in a group, a class, or a 



RELATIONS 157 

series. The advocate of wholly external relations puts the problem 
wrongly when he assumes, if relations are relevant or intrinsic, 
that means that the relations somehow or other enter into and bur- 
glarize the things, wholly upsetting their internal economy; and 
pass out after another disturbance. But there are no locked and 
barred things — no windowless monads, to begin with. All exist- 
ents are individua, unitary complexes of qualities which exist only 
in so far as they function in the totality of the real. The actual 
universe is a manifold of individua. 

If one begin with the assumption that reality consists of 
entities or terms and qualities and relations, with no more con- 
nection than a verbal conjunction in the mind of the philosopher, 
it will, of course, require a tour de force to get these disconnected 
bits of a possible world into some sort of coherent universe. The 
only alternative conclusions from such a starting point are, either 
that the real world is but an aggregate or chaotic heap of discon- 
nected entities (chaotic pluralism), or that relations are unreal and 
reality is super-relational (abstract monism). But the initial 
assumption begs the whole question as to the nature of reality. 
Reality does not consist of absolutely isolated fragments. Em- 
pirical reality is always some sort of a whole, consisting of specific 
qualities in determinate relations. Epistemologically, things are 
undoubtedly constructions out of the raw qualities of sense-experi- 
ence ; but the latter lends itself to this construction because, onto- 
logically, it is a systematic complex of determinate qualities in 
specific relations. In empirical reality there is no sound or color 
in general, no redness or smoothness in general ; only determinate 
colors, sounds, and tactile qualities. There is no equality or in- 
equality, no greater or less ; only specific sense-complexes that may 
be regarded as equal, unequal, greater and less. The relations 
which the mind finds between sense-data are indeed abstractions ; 
but these abstractions would be meaningless, were not the actual 
world a complex of systematically connected sensory data. 

While, from our special and limited points of view, there are 
relations which seem wholly external, in reality there can be no 
absolutely external relations between things. Our intellectual con- 
structions approximate in varying degree to the systematic totality 
of the real. Our thinking does indeed falsify reality, by ignoring 
many of the relations of entities and by misconceiving others. 
But thinking would have no motive even for misconstruing rela- 



158, MAN AND THE COSMOS 

tions, if the world were not a real complex of related things. It 
is because of the limitations of our ignorances or our special 
interests that many relations seem external. On the other hand, 
the supposition that ultimate reality is a super-relational absolute, 
and that all our relating activities falsify it, destroys the possibility 
of understanding or acting in a world. If there are no real rela- 
tions in the ultimate universe it must be an utterly unintelligible 
and static one ; incapable of analysis, and to the parts of which no 
predicates can be validly attributed. 

If there be a universe, then all elements of it are in some. rela- 
tions to some other elements, but not necessarily all to all. The 
universe as a whole is in no relation, since, by hypothesis, it 
includes all relations; but this does not preclude a mind, as a 
conscious focus of relationships, from truly apprehending its own 
relations to other parts of the universe and the relations of other 
parts of the universe which it contemplates to one another. The 
Spencerian argument that, because thinking is relationing, we 
cannot partially know the absolute, is a fallacy. A more serious 
argument against the reality of relations is that of which Mr. 
Bradley's dialectic is the best known modern instance. 

Mr. Bradley argues that we cannot consistently think things 
and their qualities — space, time, causality, activity, the self, etc., 
through to the end, because we always become lost in the indef- 
inite regress of terms and relations. According to this type of 
argument my relation of paternity to my son is inconsistent 
appearance, because, in order to render it intelligible, we must, 
find a relation which relates me to paternity and paternity to my 
son, other relations which relate these relations to me and him, 
and so on forever. Thus the more persistently I try to think out 
the relationship the farther my son and I drift apart. Mr. Brad- 
ley's argument is effective against any theory which would set up 
things, qualities, causality, space, time, etc., as entities existing by 
themselves. He demolishes the pluralistic world of tiny absolutes. 
But his conclusion that all determinate existents, including all 
specific truths and all qualities of finite beings, must be merged 
and transmuted in a super-relational absolute does not follow. 
There are mediating or intermediary relationships but, in the last 
analysis, all mediating relationships are grounded on immediate 
relationships. My relation to my son is a two term and asym- 
metrical immediate relationship. To say that A is the grandfather 



RELATIONS 159 

of C is to state an intermediary relationship which is grounded on 
the immediate relations, A is the father of B and B is the father 
of C. But there can be no immediate relations unless the terms 
related are distinct existents. It is true that we can never com- 
plete the apprehension of the relations in which a finite existent 
exists. There are two reasons for our inability — first, the enor- 
mous complexity and extent of relations; second, since relations 
are transactions and all existents are elements in a dynamic uni- 
verse, relations change and existents change with them. It does 
not follow that our partial knowledge of relations is false because 
it is partial, because we do not know all the relationships of the 
relata that we do know in the whole system of reality ; for example, 
the proposition "my writing paper is now on this desk" is now 
absolutely true to me; and for even a cosmic knower it must be 
true that this proposition is true for me ; otherwise, he is thus far 
a poorer knower than I am. My true apprehension of the rela- 
tions of entities are valid for me and as far as they go, because my 
position in the whole scheme of things is what it is. The relativity 
of my knowing, as compared with cosmic knowledge, does; not 
invalidate mine since the latter is the apprehension, by a finite 
member, and in part, of his own place and relations in the whole. 

It remains to add that what we regard as relevant relations, 
relations that are significant for the natures and destinies of the 
things related, depend on our individual interests, purposes and 
situations. Relations that are significant for one individual or 
purpose may be insignificant for another. The world is wide and 
rich in the natures and relations and points of view of its elements. 
But in the long run every apprehended relation that is true and 
that works must be grounded in the objective texture of reality. 
We search for relations pragmatically and we work them prag- 
matically, subject to the structural or textural order of reality. 

We may sum up the foregoing as follows : (1) If entities are in 
any relation the natures of the entities and the relations cannot be 
entirely external to, or independent of, one another. (2) There 
are many sorts of relations and degrees of closeness, intimacy, or 
relevancy in the relations of entities. Each distinguishable type 
of relationship is best called an order, or system. (3) Reality as 
a whole may be a universe or total system. Therefore, there may 
be an order of orders, a cosmic system which is fundamental to all 
the special types of order in the universe. (4) The probable char- 



160 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

acter of this supreme order canot be determined by epistemological 
or dialectical considerations alone. It can be determined only by a 
synthesis of the chief aspects of reality, after these aspects have 
been determined by a comprehensive analysis of human experiences 
and attitudes in their total characters. Specifically, we must 
consider both the real logic of sense-experience, the real logic of 
values, and the ultimate problem of the relation between the order 
of sense-experience and the order of values. 

1. The first proposition does not now require extended defense, 
since it underlies the entire discussion of knowledge and reality. 
To say that any two or more entities are so related that their 
natures would be precisely the same as they are in this relation if 
they never had been, nor could be, in this relation ; or that if the 
relation should absolutely cease the entities would not thereby be 
affected in any degree or kind of quality — is to talk nonsense. 
The assertion that things can be absolutely the same in and out of 
relations seems to be simply an appeal to the thoughtlessness of the 
naive. The more we learn to understand and control things, just 
by so much do we find that they live only in relations. The plausi- 
bility of the assertion that relations need make no difference what- 
soever to the terms related by them is due to the fact that many 
relations are, for many purposes, negligible or practically irrel- 
evant ; or, at least, in our ignorance, we are prone to think so. For 
most people's purposes it makes no difference who Ikanaton was ; 
but to the Egyptologist it makes a lot of difference, and, if I knew 
enough, I might see that it made a great difference to western 
civilization. I cannot see that the solution of certain problems in 
higher mathematics makes any serious difference to practical life 
now, but it may make a great difference to the future of both 
engineering and logic. The world is rich and wide in content. It 
contains a multitude of things, which no man can number, existing 
in multitudinous relations. Many relations that we know some- 
thing of, we, for most of our purposes, ignore. Of the significance 
of many relations that we glimpse we are ignorant. Of the very 
existence of many relations we are in total ignorance. But, either 
the universe is in some way a system or order of related entities, 
or there is no universe. 

2. There are many distinct types of order. The categories of 
the philosopher and the scientist are just generic names for the 
basic types of order. The whole business of systematic philosophy 



RELATIONS 161 

or metaphysics is to consider the various types of order and to try 
to order them into a comprehensive order system. Mathematics 
and logic are the theories of formal or abstract intellectual order. 
Metaphysics is the doctrine of concrete or real order — spatial, 
temporal, causal (physical, vital and psychological), teleological or 
axiological, social orders. Our further discussion will be con- 
cerned principally with these orders and their relations. 

3. All special types of order must be elements in the total- 
order-system of reality — the cosmos. To deny this statement 
would be to assert that, while there are various systems of order 
in the universe, since these have no relation to one another they 
are not in the universe, since there is no universe to contain them. 
But we know that the spatial and temporal relations are bound up 
with causal and teleological relations. We know that when we pass 
from abstract symbolic logic to the logic of reality, we have entered 
a realm where all orders and, therefore, all relations and entities 
related "in one another's being mingle." It is not possible to sit 
down and try to think through to the bitter end any fundamental 
problem of reality — for example, the nature of space or time or 
causality, or the nature of mechanism in its relation to life, per- 
sonality and value, without running into all the other problems. 

All special order systems, then, are probably grounded on one 
supreme living order. In so far as reality is a cosmos or universe, 
and not a chaos, it must be sustained by one ground — a cosmic 
order-of-orders. And, since the universe, as we live in it and 
know it through living in it, is dynamic, the cosmic principle or 
ground of order must be a dynamic or active principle. 

4. The final problem of metaphysics is this — what can we say, 
specifically, as to the character of the cosmic ground of order? 
Book V will be devoted to the consideration of this question. 



CHAPTEE XIII 



Order is the most fundamental and inclusive type of relation. 
Indeed, every objective and intrinsic relation depends on an order 
— spatial relations on the spatial order, temporal relations on the 
temporal order, social relations on the social order, etc. The chief 
difference between the meaning of the two notions is that when 
one speaks of relation one may have in mind only the principle of 
connection between two entities, whereas when one speaks of an 
order one definitely implies the whole existential complex, the 
particular or individual relata and their relations taken as a whole. 
Thus an order means a system of particulars or individuals con- 
nected in a regular manner, by contrast with both a collection of 
abstract relationships or subsistents and a mere junk heap of 
unrelated existents. 

The entire realm of experience includes a variety of distinct 
types of order. It is the business of the special sciences to deter- 
mine, in their respective fields, the basic types of order. It is the 
business of metaphysics to survey these various special types of 
order and to order them, if possible, into one order system or intel- 
ligible cosmos. Every order is a one-in-many, a unity or continuity 
in difference, a systematic togetherness. The ultimate order would 
be the Ordo Ordinans or supreme order, of which all special orders 
would be partial expressions. If, as Spinoza said, the order and 
connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of 
things, then the ultimate order has a two-faced series of manifesta- 
tions. Spinoza's statement oversimplifies the case, as will appear 
later when we discuss the mind-body problem. I shall argue that 
it is a reasonable hypothesis that the various special orders of 

1 The following chapter is a rapid survey, or preliminary sketch, of the 
main line of argument and doctrine that will be developed step by step in 
the entire remainder of this work. Together with Chapter 35, this chapter 
gives the logical key to the whole body of the discussion. The reader should 
bear it in mind and return to it in considering the later parts. 

162 



ORDER 163 

existence constitute a hierarchical series, and that the supreme 
principle of order is most adequately manifested in the richest type 
of finite order. There is, however, another sense in which 
Spinoza's statement is true — namely, that order is at once mentally 
objective and physically objective; there is a correspondence be- 
tween the order of true thinking and thoughtful willing on the one 
hand and the order of physical reality, the space-time-motion order, 
on the other hand. 

In books III, IV and V we shall be concerned with the concrete 
characteristics of the various main types of existents and with their 
relations to one another as aspects of the cosmos. A rapid survey 
of the hierarchy of order series will make a logical transition to 
III. Every order involves particulars in relation. 

1. Qualitative Order. — The simplest cases of order are perhaps 
those of the generic orders of sense qualities. Colors are each and 
every one distinct existents, but they form a scale of order; so 
with sounds, temperatures, etc. There are orders of intensity ; for 
example, degrees of brightness, color saturation, pleasure, pain, 
pitch, etc. It may be that the order of qualitative differences 
within the same sensory kind is in every case reducible to the order 
of intensive magnitude or degree. 

2. Spatial Order. — Our three dimensional space involves a 
number of orders, such as — points on a line, lines on a surface, 
depth, sense or direction, before and behind, straight ahead, 
above, below, right and left. Every spatial order involves relations 
between particular positions existing simultaneously. The most 
familiar instance is the relation of all observed positions to the 
observer's position. Positions are the individua of spatial order. 
One set of spatial order may be transformed into another, by super- 
position, translation, or by imagining the observer translated, in- 
verted, etc. The mind can manipulate spatial order in various 
ways, as in geometries ; but it must first find spatial order before 
it can juggle with it; and transcendental geometries are logical 
jugglings of the empirically found spatial order. In brief, spatial 
order is given as real in sensory experience and found to be intelli- 
gible — that is, intellectually manageable within the limits of its 
given nature. 

3. Temporal Order. — This again is a simple and unique prop- 
erty of experience as lived (Erlebniss is the expressive German 
word). It is the irreversible flux or movement of experiences from 



164 MAN AND THE COSMOS 



. 



past through present toward future. 2 Temporal order has thui 
one sense or direction. (It seems to be misleading to call it a 
"dimension" and to speak of time as a fourth dimension of space. 
It would be just as correct to speak of space as the second, third 
and fourth directions of time). Space and time involve each other, 
since spatial orders imply the simultaneity of points and direc- 
tions ; that is, their temporal duration ; and the temporal order of 
duration involves the occupation of moments or instants by posi- 
tions. I have said that temporal order is single as well as irre- 
versible. These statements are questionable. Could it not be said 
that temporal order is double — that it has two directions or senses, 
from the present backwards to the past and forwards to the future ; 
and if this is so may not temporal order be reversible ? Mr. Brad- 
ley argues for a variety of time series — one, for instance, in which 
death is followed by old age, maturity, youth, childhood, birth, 
conception. I can conceive of one finite temporal series as being 
the exact repetition of another, but I am unable to conceive of one 
infinite temporal series of real events being the precise reverse of 
another. Such a supposition would, it seems to me, imply that one 
of the series in question is illusory or imaginary, one of Leibniz's 
possible worlds. There may be an indefinite multitude of temporal 
series, with different rates of velocities, but they must all have 
one direction, if experience be not wholly illusory. The empirical 
temporal order is one direction, since the past does not grow out 
of the present but the present out of the past as the future out of 
the present. The temporal order, in the forms of either the per- 
duration of a system of relations through a stretch of time or a 
definite sequence of distinct events, is basic to all conceptions of 
continuity. 

Whether it be spatial continuity, numerical continuity, dura- 
tional continuity, or causal continuity; in every case the idea of 
continuity is that of an order of permanent or regular relations 
enduring through a temporal succession. (Compare Chapters 
XIV, XVI, XVIII, XXXV, and XXXVII.) 

4. Numerical Order arises, as we saw in Chapter XI, from the 
location and arrangement of sense qualities in space and time, 
but numerical ordering of existents always implies a judgment of 
value. If one is counting or measuring things without regard to 

2 For Bergson, time is the unique dimension of life. Eeal time is liv- 
ingness. 



ORDER 165 

differences of value the question of order is indifferent. If I am 
considering how many books I have, regardless of their contents, 
it makes no difference in what order I count them. If I were 
arranging them for sale I should do it in the order of their values. 
When we arrange things in numerical order; for example, the 
batting order of a baseball team, the order of precedence at a social 
function, the order of merit on examinations, orders of greatness 
in statesmanship or art, we are using ordinal number to express an 
order of values. Thus the order of values is implicated in the 
ordering of existents. Indeed it is tied up with our simplest 
spatial and temporal orderings. 

5. Causal Order. — A causal order is an irreversible series in 
which the occurrence of one event is an indispensable condition of 
the occurrence of the next event. Thus the causal order is a tem- 
poral order which involves the idea of the existential dependence 
of one event on the immediately precedent events. Existential, 
temporal dependence differentiates the causal order from a logical 
order of timeless implication (ground and consequent) . The notion 
of causal order is thus a more concrete form of the notion of tem- 
poral order. The irreversibility of the temporal flux implies that 
the preceding instants or moments contain the real conditions of 
the present, that a specific complex of qualities in relation is the 
condition of a succeeding complex. The maxim, every event must 
have a cause, means nothing more than that in the flux of experi- 
ence the antecedent is the condition of the coming into existence 
of the consequent. The fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc is a 
fallacy only because of lack of thorough analysis of repeated obser- 
vations. We have really no other ground for asserting a causal 
relation than that of immediate contiguity and succession of events 
in the spatial and temporal order. The supposed necessity of the 
causal order is the universal empirical fact of the one-directional, 
irreversible flux of temporal experience. 

A causal order, considered as a blind push or inevitable pro- 
cession in which each successive moment is made by the rearrange- 
ment in space of the factors in the preceding moment, in which one 
collocation issues blindly in the next collocation, and in which 
there is complete quantitative and qualitative equivalence in the 
two collocations, is a mechanical causal order. There are close 
approximations to mechanical causal orders in the realm of inor- 
ganic nature ; but, since new collocations give rise to new assem- 



166 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

blages of qualities, it may be doubted whether even the inorganic 
realm is wholly mechanical. Indeed, if the second law of thermo- 
dynamics be valid, this cannot be the case. 

6. Teleological Order is a causal order in which the successive 
moments are not the blind and inevitable products of the re- 
arrangements of collocations of atoms, but one in which a unity of 
plan or meaning pervades and is developed through a series of 
moments, which thus constitute not a mere serial sequence of 
slightly differing events but a persisting whole which is present in 
all its parts and makes of them an organic totality. The teleo- 
logical order is a temporal and causal order which unifies its suc- 
cessive moments in a trans-temporal totality. Here we begin to 
get a clew to a principle of cosmic order or organization that is 
temporal and yet permanent, many and yet one, including a suc- 
cession of events in a noneventual meaning, causal and yet pur- 
posive. It is sometimes said that teleological causality involves 
the determination of the present by the future. This is mis- 
leading. It involves the unification or continuity of the present 
with the past by a plan or meaning which is continuous with and 
expands into the future as the latter becomes present. It is in the 
organic, mental and social orders that we find teleological order. 

7. Organic and Mental Orders. — These I treat together since 
it is in the mental-teleological order that the meaning of the or- 
ganic order becomes manifest. An organism is a whole in which 
the parts cannot exist apart from the whole and the principle of the 
whole functions in all the parts. An organism may be regarded as 
a machine, since it consists of mechanisms ; but, since it is a self- 
running, self -rep airing and self -reproducing machine, it is more 
than a mere machine. The order of life exhibits a large number 
of degrees of organic unity emerging from, supervening upon, and 
controlling mechanisms. A mental order — for example, a single 
type of purposed human activity, or better still the organized unity 
of a whole human life as the continuous fulfillment of a plan or a 
meaning — is an order in which the successive steps or moments are 
not external to one another and not the blind rearrangement of 
similar elements. One moment or act does not placidly dissolve 
its elements to be blindly rearranged into the next act. A con- 
tinuous plan or meaning embodied in a whole life is an order in 
which the particular acts and experiences interpenetrate, since 
they are all pervaded and organized by the principle of the whole. 



ORDER 167 

The past lives in the whole of the present and the present is big 
with the future, and past, present and future are phases in the 
living unity of a unique and individual life and experience. Per- 
haps the supertemporal or "eternal' 7 meaning of life and the 
cosmos will be found in the notion of Spiritual Order (see Chap- 
ter XXXV). 

8. Axiological Order or order of values. The achievement and 
conservation of intrinsic values — such as welfare, happiness, love, 
beauty, truth — are the determining or unifying and controlling 
principles in the teleological order. To discuss the nature of 
values and their place in reality at this point would be to anticipate 
future chapters. It is sufficient here to point out that the order of 
values enters into our ordering in other orders; even ordering 
existents spatially, temporally, numerically and causally involves 
ordering in terms of values. In the organic and mental orders 
values appear explicitly, and in their own right, as determining 
principles. 

9. Social Order. — This is the richest and most inclusive type 
of order. It is par excellence a teleological and axiological order. 
Social organization, the institutions of politics, law, morality, edu- 
cation, religion, science, art and letters — in short, the whole work 
of culture — is a complex of partial orders in which the superindi- 
vidual order of society is furthered. It is an old saying that a 
man realizes his true being in the social order. The truest indi- 
vidual, the fullest personality, is the one who is most nearly 
typical, universal, or super-individual in his thinking and his 
deeds. As we shall see more fully later on, the social mind is not 
an entity which exists as such apart from the minds of the indi- 
vidual members of the social order. But the social mind is more 
than the mind of any individual as he actually is when taken in 
isolation from his fellows. It is not the arithmetical sum of the 
minds of the individual members of society. In becoming the 
organ of the purposes of society, in making himself the instrument 
for the realization of the cultural values of the social order, the 
individual is transcending his given individuality. The mind of 
a nation, the mind of England, for example, or the spirit of the 
church or the university, live and move and have their being in the 
members of the social order; but they are more enduringly real 
than the individual members regarded as private centers of feeling 
and thought. They transform the individuals by giving them 



168 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

membership in a spiritual order which is not the sum of individual 
feelings, thoughts and volitions ; for the spirit of a society is one 
which binds human souls, past, present and to come, into a living 
and enduring unity. This conception of a spiritual order which is 
more pervasive and enduring than any individual mind will be 
considered more at length later on when we come to discuss the 
problem of the ultimate order or cosmic unity. 



CHAPTEE XIV 



The "things" of immediate sense experience are discrete com- 
plexes of sensory qualities. But these discrete things are all per- 
ceived and conceived to be present simultaneously in a continuous 
medium, namely space. Common sense means by the continuity 
of space that no two portions of space, however minute, are sep- 
arated either by no being or by nonspatial being. What common 
sense means by empty space is a portion of space in which our 
efforts meet with no perceptible resistance ; and in which, through 
our senses of sight, touch and movement, we are conscious of no 
movement or resistance. So-called empty space is not literally 
empty since we perceive light, color and atmosphere in it. It 
transmits movements not detected by the unaided senses ; such as 
radio-active transformations, electromagnetic tensions and gravita- 
tion. The universal space-filling ether is assumed to exist as the 
continuous medium for the transmissions of these movements and 
forces. As Lord Salisbury said, ether was invented as a subject 
for the verb "to undulate." Indeed, it is a postulate ~of theoretical 
thought and of practical activity that there is dynamic continuity 
everywhere in the realm of nature. Static continuity is simply 
our coarse, in-the-lump way of perceiving dynamical continuity. 

On the other hand, physics and chemistry find cogent grounds 
for the hypothesis that the concrete things of sense perception are 
made up of very minute and imperceptible corpuscles (electrons 
in the newest form of the corpuscular hypothesis) which are con- 
stant in inertia or mass and in their attractive and repulsive 
mutual relations (valence in chemistry). It is impossible to 
believe that perceptible matter is absolutely continuous, in view 
of its enormous capacity for expansion and contraction. The 
phenomena of the expansion and contraction of gases, of solutions 
and of osmosis, are impossible to account for on any other hypoth- 
esis than that of the granular structure of matter. In the elec- 

169 



170 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

tronic theory of matter the ordinary atom is regarded as built up 
out of a core or nucleus of negative electricity with the units of 
positive electricity revolving around it. Mass or inertia is present 
wherever there is potential energy. 

We are not here concerned with the question of the ultimate 
structure of physical matter. The granular theory carries out, to 
a high degree of refinement, the logical demand for discrete ele- 
ments to account for the qualitative discreteness of perceived 
things. On the other hand, the physicist finds it impossible to 
work out a granular theory without postulating some sort of con- 
tinuous medium as carrier of the dynamical relations between the 
corpuscles. The ether performs this logical function in present 
day physics and thus logically is identical with physical space. If 
the ether should be scrapped, some other medium will have to be 
invented to take its place. For both common sense thinking and 
physical theory, which is a refinement of common sense thinking, 
require the recognition of both discreteness, or particularity, and 
complexity, in the elements of the world and of continuity or 
systematic interrelatedness between these elements. At one time 
continuity may be uppermost and at another time discreteness, 
according to the problem in hand. If one is bent on microscopic 
analysis of sense data, discreteness plays the principal role ; if one 
is bent on synthesis, continuity bulks largest. From the ana- 
lytical point of view, the discrete elements are substantive and 
continuity is transitive. On the other hand, from a comprehensive 
or synthetical point of view, continuity is substantive. A ground 
of interaction must be as real as the multitude of individual ele- 
ments that interact. It is obvious that here we have to do with a 
capital phase of the metaphysical problem of singularism and 
pluralism, of the one and many. The universe must be some sort 
of one-in-many. The acute problem is as to which is more funda- 
mental, the manyness of the individual elements, or the oneness of 
their ground of interrelation. 

The whole problem of discreteness and continuity, pluralism 
and singularism, takes on a new turn when we consider the world 
as a temporal process. Experienced change is a succession of dis- 
crete movements since, as William James puts it : empirical time 
comes in drops ; 1 the present moment is a single pulse of experi- 

1 Cf. James, Some Problems of Philosophy; especially Chaps. 10 and 11. 



THE PARTICULAR, UNIVERSAL, AND INDIVIDUAL 171 

ence, in which is fused together a variety of features; any two 
successive presents are more or less discontinuous. What I experi- 
enced an hour ago is discontinuous with what I now experience. 
When we bring into our purview months and years, the discon- 
tinuity becomes more striking. When we take into account cen- 
turies and millenniums of history, the discontinuity becomes still 
more striking. Temporal or historical series are discrete. All the 
past events which one can think of have ceased to exist and no two 
of them were absolutely alike, otherwise they would not have been 
two but one. The history of a single organism, of the human indi- 
vidual, of a nation, of a church, of the evolutionary series of living 
organisms, of a planet, of a solar system — all these histories are 
discrete series, stories of the development and decay of individual 
wholes. 

History or development involves novelty — the emergence of 
new individuals, their transformation and disappearance. There 
would be no meaning in history, evolution, development, if there 
were no novelties, no new qualitative syntheses, no emergence of 
differing individualities. A temporal or historical world is thus 
essentially a world of discreteness, of novelties. If the new were 
the same as the old, the effects identical with the causes, the suc- 
cession of individualities a bare repetition, development and decay, 
evolution and retrogression, would be equally without meaning. 
The distinctions between pasts, presents, and futures would vanish. 
On the other hand, the logical and practical demand for continuity 
is equally in evidence in our study of the historical world. 

Unless there be traceable continuity in the process, there can 
be no grasping of sequences or steps as serial. A process that is not 
continuous is not one process, but a chaotic procession of discon- 
nected episodes. Thus, without reference to continuities of some 
description, history and development are meaningless. Through 
fragmentary consciousness and meager materials of memory, we 
construct a belief in the continuity of our own personalities. 
Through fragmentary historical record we construct the continuity 
of a nation's life, of a cultural movement, of the life of humanity, 
of life on the earth, of the solar system. We trace the development 
of the spirit of England as revealed from age to age, of the spirit 
of Christianity, of the evolution of life, or the solar system. Thus 
the notion of historical continuity is a conceptual construction, not 
a matter of immediate experience. Nevertheless, it is motivated 



172 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

by both practical and theoretical postulates — the theoretical desire 
to comprehend the successive steps in the life of any individual 
whole as constituting an ordered sequence or series and thus being 
an individual whole ; the practical desire to gain, from the ordered 
continuity of the past, prevision and control of the future through 
the present or at least inspiration and guidance for action. 

Finite number is a discrete series, unfolding according to a 
perfectly determinate law of production; physical changes have 
been, to a considerable extent, shown to be subject to numerical 
laws of production. Why not then all historical changes? The 
mechanical-causal postulate is extended in thorough-going fashion 
to all fields of history or development, and means that there is a 
perfectly determinate law of production for a series of events. All 
so-called novelties would then be wholly predetermined. The vari- 
ations and individuations in the process of time would be the 
inevitable consequences of a perfectly determinate system of laws, 
expressing the behavior of an equally determinate number of indi- 
vidual units alike in every respect, except for their space relations. 
Novelty and individuality would thus be nothing more than the 
effect produced on man's mind by the space redistributions in the 
arrangements of elements having eternally constant properties of 
inertia or mass ; that is, of simply mechanical attraction or repul- 
sion. 

But our actual world is a historical world, a world of develop- 
ing and changing individuals of many descriptions (I use the term 
"individual" to include organisms, persons, nations, cultural move- 
ments, the system of living beings, the earth, the solar system). 
The denial of novelty, of individuality and development, is the 
denial of the most characteristic feature of the actual world. In 
it there is verifiable continuity, dynamic interrelation, between 
successive states. The whole universe is an all-inclusive living 
individuality or system. But since there are, and in the measure 
in which there are, in the universe, discrete centers of action and 
passion, concrete individuals, there are limits to the causal explana- 
tion of the qualities and actions of any individual member of the 
universe in terms of the rest of the system. The explanation of 
the life history of one individual member of the system cannot be 
found wholly either in the antecedent phases of the system or in 
the simultaneous phase of the system. It must be found in part in 
the self-active character of the individual member. In short, there 



THE PARTICULAR, UNIVERSAL, AND INDIVIDUAL 173 

are two kinds of temporal continuity: (a) the mechanical con- 
tinuity which would account for the character and state of every 
finite individual as being the mathematical expression of forces 
behind and outside that individual ; (b) the teleological continuity 
within the life history of an individual (including those individ- 
uals which are groups of lesser individuals) as being a unique 
self-active member of a larger system. In other words, the actual 
historical world is one of creative novelty, of genuine development. 
Real history is constituted by the self-development of individuals 
in interaction. 

It must be admitted then that discreteness, or qualitative 
uniqueness, and self-activity or individuality, are just as elemental 
features of the world as continuity. Perhaps they are even more 
elemental. The universe seems not so much one as it is many — 
many individuals of many kinds in many relations. 

There appears to be a quarrel between the concrete individ- 
uality of actual intuition and the results of analytical science. The 
latter tends to evaporate an individual into an aggregation of quali- 
tatively poor atoms, brought together and held together by purely 
external relations. Psychology dissolves personality into sensa- 
tions and impulses or, more recently, into reflex movements, and 
these into neurone processes. Bio-chemistry dissolves neurone 
processes into reactions of the chemical elements. Physics dis- 
solves the chemical elements into constellations of electrons. Thus, 
concrete individuals are reduced to an external exemplification of 
more elemental qualities; and the latter, in turn, to spatial 
arrangements of elements having no qualitative differences except 
physical attraction and repulsion. Thus physical or mechanistic 
metaphysics reduces all other qualities, and hence all individuali- 
ties, to variations in the spatial arrangements of units having only 
two qualities — negative signs and plus signs in electricity. The 
analytical and generalizing activity of science ends in the elimina- 
tion of all individuality. Since individuality thus disappears 
before the destroying hand of analytical intelligence, recent phi- 
losophers, notably William James and H. Bergson, have argued 
that we can know reality only by abandoning intelligence or reason 
and laying hold on it through intuition, since it is thus that we ap- 
prehend individuality in ourselves and others. This, it seems to 
me, is a poor refuge, based on a one-sided conception of the nature 
of intelligence or thought. I propose, therefore, to consider here 



174 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

what the relation of the individual is to the universal from the 
point of view of reflection. 

Clearly, the individuating interest is everywhere in evidence 
in naive thought, action and feeling. In perceiving and interact- 
ing with the physical order, in recognizing and holding intercourse 
with other selves, man never apprehends a general quality or uni- 
versal, a what divorced from an individuated unity of qualities, 
or that It is only in the vague and rough philosophizing which 
consists in hypostatizing abstractions and symbols that one ever 
falls into the error of thinking that any sort of reality can be an 
abstract universal, a bare whatnessj such as being in general, color 
that is no specific color, justice that is no specific case of justice, 
etc. The realities that we recognize and hold intercourse with in 
thought and action, that we appreciate in feeling, are always de- 
terminate. The selective interests, the specific desires and aims, 
which motivate action and thought lead to the individuation of 
things. Selective individuating interest is the controlling principle 
in human life. The world of his experience responds to man's 
individuating interest. It presents to him an ascending series of 
individua ; from the bare particularity of the grain of sand or dust, 
through the crystal with its individuality of space arrangement, 
and the unified complexes of qualities which through their im- 
manent organizing principle constitute plants and animals, up to 
man himself in which the organizing activity is in part controlled 
by conscious purpose. 

What then is a true individual ? The particular is frequently 
confused with the individual. The former connotes the merely 
isolated single object in its bare isolation, the mere that almost 
wholly unqualified by relations. The individual is the particular 
grasped in a context, and as a unified whole of various qualities-in- 
relation ; that is, as a system. To appreciate the individuality of 
any object of cognition or feeling one must determine its character 
as a whole in terms of universals. One must say what it is. The 
bare particular is unmeaning and indescribable, because it is not 
grasped as a concrete union of different universals. Its that has 
no what, consequently its that is a vanishing point. The true indi- 
vidual is a concretion of universals. 

A true individual is an internal or immanent unity of diverse 
properties, with self-activity which issues in self-maintenance and 
self-development. It must have richness or complexity of qualities 



THE PARTICULAR, UNIVERSAL, AND INDIVIDUAL 175 

and it must, as a unity, own these diverse qualities in some degree 
of harmony. Unity-in-diversity and self-developing-activity then 
are the indispensable attributes of individuality. Comprehensive- 
ness and harmony must both be present. It is evident that we find 
these characteristics fully manifest only in conscious beings, that 
is, in selves. An immanent dynamic system of self-developing 
capacities is just what is meant by the teleological unity of selfhood 
or personality. It is true that in the lives of selves fixity of pur- 
pose and unity of character may seem to be sacrificed by wide 
diversity of interests and activities, as in the dilettante pursuit of 
art and letters ; and vice versa, breadth and variety of interests by 
concentration and persistence of purpose in one direction, for 
example, in the money grubber. But genuine harmony is not 
monotony. It is the organization of diversities of action, feeling 
and thought. In the end breadth and variety of interest must 
bring the richer individuality. True individuality involves in 
some degree universality of aim and interest. The self becomes a 
universe in little by seeking universality, in the sense of concrete 
organization and harmony or maximum comprehensiveness in life 
and experience. 

The degree of individuality possessed by any being is the 
measure of its worth. The principle of individuality or person- 
ality is the supreme principle of value. The individual is the 
center of reference for interests and valuations or appreciations. 
It is very obvious that our vital interests in social life are in indi- 
viduals ; in brother and sister, lover and wife, friend and enemy, 
colleague and neighbor. 

Masses of men interest us only as actual or potential groups of 
individual agents. A political speaker or a preacher is interested 
in a mass meeting only as a group of individuals who will 
react favorably to argument, emotional appeal, and suggestion. 
Churches, political parties, social, scientific, and literary move- 
ments, are individualities of more comprehensive type inclusive of 
a plurality of persons. In art, in the drama, in fiction and history, 
the controlling interest is always in the presentation either of the 
character of single individuals or of the spiritual and significant 
unity of more inclusive systems of individuality. Shakespeare's 
Hamlet or Tempest, Goethe's Faust, Dante's Divine Comedy, 
Milton's Paradise Lost — these are all types of spiritual individual 
wholes. Their universal significance is contained in their spiritual 



176 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

unity or harmony of feeling and action. The controlling interest 
in history is in the individual actor in his unique social and 
political relations ; Julius Caesar, Napoleon the First, Luther, or 
Bismarck; the unique social or spiritual-historical movement, 
Koman Imperialism, the French Kevolution, the Origins of Chris- 
tianity, the Protestant Keformation, the European Eenaissance; 
the unique fortunes of individual nations, Ancient Greece, Eng- 
land, France, the United States. A great work of art, a historical 
culture-movement, a political development, a religion, is significant 
just because it is a comprehensive unity, a living organization of 
spiritual life, a super personal life. The general tendencies, laws 
or forces, of life and history have actuality only as they are con- 
creted in the individual whole, in selves and systems of selves. 
In every field the universal has the function of defining and 
expressing the relationships of individual elements in individual 
systems or complexes. The individual, out of reference to a sys- 
tematic whole, becomes a barren and insignificant particular. The 
universal not concreted in individuals is nought but an equally 
barren abstraction, a mere abstract general notion. To sunder the 
what or universal from the that or specific reality is to deprive the 
latter of all meaning and value and the former of all existence. 
The real is always the significant individual, the immanent unity 
of diverse qualities and relations, and the world-whole is the all- 
inclusive and richest individuality. 

It is often said that thought cannot grasp the individual and 
unique, since thought is discursive in operation. It abstracts and 
generalizes. It must thus sunder the what from the that If 
therefore the real be individual, thought can never grasp its 
essence. We may then, perhaps, feel or intuit reality, but we can 
never comprehend it, since to do this we must distill and evaporate 
the individual and unique into the general or common. Emotion 
and intuition are the sole individuating functions of mind, we are 
told, and all intelligent thinking must lag behind them. I cannot 
admit this severance of thought and feeling, of intellection and 
immediate experience. The development of feeling and volition 
is conditioned by the organizing activity of thought. Through 
reflection feelings becomes more articulate and significant. 
Through thought conation becomes, in place of random impulse, 
the persistent and more harmonious development of purposive 
volitional unity. Thought does not function in the blue ether, it 



THE PARTICULAR, UNIVERSAL, AND INDIVIDUAL 177 

does not wing itself through the inane. In all genuine cognitive 
thinking there is an intuitive factor. Reflective comprehension 
does not descend from heaven upon immediate experience. The 
former grows out of the latter and is inextricably interwoven 
therewith. I know myself, and I know other selves, through the 
constructive interpretation of immediate experience. Instead of 
contrasting and separating intelligence and intuition, as Bergson 
does, I would maintain that they cannot properly be divorced. 
Both in cognition and conation, intelligence and intuition are com- 
plementary factors. The great scientist has not less but much more 
intuitive insight than the clodhopper. The great poet has not less 
but more intuitive vision than the hack writer. The great states- 
man has not less but more intuition of the political nature of man 
than the ward boss. In every case the more is due to the more 
intimate interfusion of reflective intelligence and immediate ex- 
perience. As Kant put it, percepts without concepts are blind. 
But does not science deliberately abstract from the individual, 
and treat it merely as an example of the universal, a junction-point 
of concepts or laws ? Matter, motion, energy, ether, natural selec- 
tion, gravitation, with their more specific subsidiary formulae — 
are not all these categories of science purely abstract general con- 
ceptions to which the individual is wholly indifferent ? Is not the 
quest for laws of connection and sequence a search for the universal 
and a neglect of the particular ? For example, must not history, 
in order to become scientific, relinquish the depiction and interpre- 
tation of so-called great personalities as creative centers in the 
historical life ; cease to regard so-called great creative periods such 
as the Periclean age of Greece, the Renaissance and Protestant 
Reformation, as having more inherent significance or mental 
causality than any other section of history of the same length of 
time ; and become "sociological" by showing that all such person- 
alities and individual movements are but the inevitable resultants 
of universal forces such as economic and climatic factors ? Will 
not the history of the future become a deductive science in which 
the individual will be viewed and explained simply as a junction 
point of sociological laws and formulas ? I am not concerned here 
to discuss the proper methods and province of history, but I wish 
to point out that the economic, geographical, and climatic factors 
in history have themselves individual characters and significance 
in relation to the psychical factors. The physical and economic 



178 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

factors of social life themselves undergo changes which are impli- 
cated with the whole mental movement of man in history. 

It is trne that physics and chemistry operate with (approx- 
imately) fixed constants and regard their facts as constellations 
of particulars rather than as unitary individuals. The special 
sciences may be classified in the order of the ascending concrete- 
ness or individuality of their respective subject-matters. Begin- 
ning with terrestrial and solar physics the most "abstract" or 
general science, we have next chemistry, which deals with more 
specific properties of bodies, then biology whose objects have more 
determinate or individual character, then psychology whose ob- 
jects are the highly individuated bodies in which consciousness 
is predominant, then the social and historical sciences of culture 
(general history, the comparative study of morals, politics, re- 
ligion, and art) which deal with the most concrete and spiritual 
types of historical individualities. Finally, we have systematic 
ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, and metaphysics, which 
are concerned with the ultimate significance of spiritual individu- 
ality. This contrast, however, does not mean that physics has 
no concern with the individual character of reality and the cul- 
ture sciences no concern with generalization. It means rather 
that the individual fact of physics is more abstract or poorer in 
its qualities and relations than the individual facts of history, 
the human social order, the moral life, the sesthetical or religious 
experience. The order of the sciences corresponds to the increas- 
ing richness and concrete significance and value of their objects. 
The world of the physical and biological sciences is too a world 
with a determinate individual character and evolution. It is in 
reality a historical world of a lower order. For example, the 
study of radio-active manifestations and the law of Mendelyeev 
suggest that the chemical elements have had a history with a de- 
terminate evolution. The second law of thermo-dynamics indi- 
cates that the solar energy has a determinate history, a specific 
individuality of its own. The various theories of the evolution 
of the solar system, of the earth, and of life on the earth, involve 
determinate histories of individual wholes of increasing com- 
plexity and inclusiveness. 2 

It is a misconception of science to say that its sole aim is to 

2 On the whole subject of history and individuality compare, Heinrich 
Eiekert, Vie Grenzen der natunvissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung. Zweite 
Auflage. 



THE PARTICULAR, UNIVERSAL, AND INDIVIDUAL 179 

establish general formulae or laws which shall express the bare 
identities of objects whose differences are negligible. The par- 
ticular facts of chemistry or biology are not adequately under- 
stood, if they are viewed simply as repetitions of similarities in 
quality and behavior. This may be the goal of pure mechanics. 
But even in mathematical physics the aim is the formulation of 
differential equations for motion and other forms of continuous 
physical change. 

The particular fact when seen in its relations then first be- 
comes a scientific fact. Science does not consist in collecting 
particulars; this is but its preliminary spade-work. The inter- 
pretation of the particular in the light of universals is the goal 
of science. In other words, it is the particular become individ- 
ualized, through taking its place in a cognitive system or having 
membership in a organized whole. One who has only an "ab- 
stract" or "general" notion of energy, or gravitation or electricity 
has not a genuinely scientific conception of these things. Recog- 
nition of this is expressed in the confession of relative ignorance 
when one says, "I have only a general idea of the subject." To 
have a scientific concept of anything involves a knowledge of the 
varied and determinate modes of behavior of the thing in ques- 
tion, that is, the laws of its specific transformations. As Lotze 
says, the concept of anything is the law of its states. The truly 
scientific concept of energy, for example, is filled in with knowl- 
edge of how energy behaves specifically in its different forms and 
under varying conditions. The general notion is a short-hand 
expression for certain basic qualities of behavior by virtue of 
which individuals constitute an ordered group system or series. 
The concept man or mammal is not a mere extract of repeated 
similars or bare identities in a class of objects. It is a principle 
of relation which expresses at once the differentiation of the 
group which it designates, from near but contrasting groups, and 
the identity or continuity of features which, as specified in the 
individual members of this group, constitute it a significant serial 
totality. The universals which define individuals and groups are 
the laws of systematic series, functions of thought which express 
the order of relations by which individuals are members of more 
comprehensive wholes. 

A human person becomes not less but more individualized and 
significant when he is found to be describable in many relations 



180 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

or universals. To know a man as a worker in a certain field, a 
citizen, a husband and father, a lover of poetry and art, a sports- 
man, a churchman, a friend, is to know him infinitely better than 
simply as a nodding acquaintance or even a business associate. 
In place of seeing him as a vague particular or unit, when I come 
to know him in all these relations he becomes a more concrete uni- 
versal, a truer individual. 

There is no doubt that it is the self-intuition of one's own 
individuality and one's selective purposive interest that is the 
subjective spring of individuation in one's intercourse with the 
world. On the other hand, it is equally true to say that one's 
intuition of one's own individuality is defined, and one's purposive 
activity is determined, through the give and take of social inter- 
course by way of action and passion with other individualities. 
The development of cognition, conation, and feeling in the self 
is the growth of the individual in a world of individuals. Only 
as member of a universe of individuals does the single self come 
into his own. The progressive definition or determination of the 
self is the progressive discovery, through action, thought and feel- 
ing, of a world of individuals. The movement towards richer and 
more harmonious individuality or personality is, I shall aim to 
show more fully later in the discussion, the meaning of the world 
process. This meaning is realized through its exemplification in 
a multitude of selves which, as individuals in relation, are mem- 
bers of a higher individuality or, if you will, of a superindividu- 
ality. It would, however, be misleading to say that the ultimate 
reality, or the universe in its totality, is an all-inclusive individ- 
ual or the absolute individual. That would imply that the rela- 
tion of finite selves to the absolute individual is simply that of 
parts to the whole. Ultimate reality at its highest level must 
be a society of selves or persons, whose ground and pattern, may 
be indeed, a supreme individual or self, but whose members, havj 
ing relative self-activity are related to that self not as parts of 
his being but as offspring of his creative activity, endowed with 
the capacity to live in relations to him analogous to their relations 
to other finite members of the whole society. 

The finite individual is a dependent but active center of 
reality, able progressively to harmonize his inner being, and there- 
with his relations with other finite members of the ultimate so- 
ciety and with the source and ground of the whole. 



CHAPTER XV 



SUBSTANCE 



The most far-reaching distinction made with respect to the data 
of experience is between persons and things. This distinction 
has grown out of a distinction between living beings and nonliving 
things. These distinctions were not made in primitive thinking. 
For early man, as for the child, there was no clear separation to 
be drawn between inanimate and animate objects; nor, among 
animate objects, between persons and living beings who are not 
persons. The primitive philosophy is animistic, or to nse Mr. 
Marett's term, cmimatistic. (Zooism, meaning that all things are 
alive is a better term for the primitive world view. ) We are not 
concerned here with the genetic question how these distinctions 
came to be made, nor are we at present concerned with the ques- 
tion of their ultimate validity. Our present concern is with the 
problem: how are we to think "things" consistently, and this 
problem will lead us directly into the problem of substance. 

The thing is a determinate complex of qualities. An apple, 
for instance, consists of a determinate roundness, redness, texture, 
savor, cohering by being present together in one space-time con- 
figuration. What we call a "thing" is relative to our interests. 
An apple is one thing for the buyer and eater. An apple seed 
is a thing for the orchardist. Its cells are things for the botanist. 

The unity of the thing is conceived after the analogy of the 
unity of the self in recognizing the thing. For, just as the self 
is believed to have certain permanent interests and a consequent 
unity and continuity of being, known through memory and re- 
flection, which unity and continuity persist through varying cir- 
cumstance; so a thing is a persisting unity of diverse qualities. 
Indeed, the recognition of the unity of diverse qualities which con- 
stitutes the thing, is quite dependent upon the unity and continuity 
of the self s interest therein and attention thereto. Hence, there 
is no logical difference between the problems of the relation of 

181 



182 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the unity of the thing to the diversity of its qualities and of the 
continuity of the thing through the changes in its qualities, and 
the problems of the unity of the self amidst the diversity of its 
experiences and of the continuity of the self through its chang- 
ing experiences. 

Ever since Plato, dialecticians have exercised their subtlety 
on these problems. It will suffice here to note briefly what the 
problems are and how they lead into the problem of substance and 
the various solutions thereof. 1 First, what is the relation of the 
thing to its qualities ? What is the relation of the thinghood of 
the apple to its roundness, redness, sweetness, etc. ? If the apple 
thing is just roundness plus redness plus sweetness, etc., then the 
distinction between the thing and its qualities vanishes. If the 
apple thing is not the empirical quality-complex but a substrate 
underneath and supporting the qualities, then we must have a 
relation to unite the qualities with the thing. But if the relation, 
r, is something between the real thing and the empirical qualities, 
then we must think a relation r 1 , to unite r with the thing and 
another relation r 2 to unite r with the qualities; and there is no 
end to this process of assuming relations to relate relations that 
are between other relations. Thus, the more thoroughly we try 
to think out the relation of the thing-substance or substrate to 
its qualities, the wider apart they fly. We have set out upon 
the endless regress and we never can get the two terms of our 
naive proposition, "the thing is the union of its qualities/' together. 

Again, redness is not roundness and neither redness nor round- 
ness is sweetness; how then can they all cohere in one thing? 
Furthermore, the qualities of the thing change ; the apple grows, 
ripens, decays, or is eaten and ceases to be an apple; but when 
does it cease to be an apple ? In Mr. Bradley's illustration : Sir 
John Suckling's silk stockings were darned with black silk yarn 
until there was nothing of the original green silk left ; were they 
still the same stockings? How can a thing preserve its identity 



*For recent discussions of these problems see F. H. Bradley, Appearance 
and Eeality, especially Chaps. 1, 2, 3, and 8 ; A. E. Taylor, Elements of Meta- 
physics, Book i, Chap. 4; William James; A Pluralistic Universe, Appendix 
A, ' ' The Thing and its Eelations ' ' ; J. Eoyce ; The World and the Individual, 
Vol. I, especially Lecture iii; Lotze, Metaphysics, Book i, Chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4; 
The Logic of Hegel, translated by Wallace, especially pp. 232 ff. ; also pp. 273 
ff.; Alexander, Space, Time and Deity, Vol. I, Book ii, Chaps. 6 and 10 and 
Vol. II, passim. 



SUBSTANCE 183 

through change of qualities, if it be but the sum of its qualities ? 
If it be not the sum of its qualities, is it anything whatsoever? 
Briefly, if the thing is identical with its qualities, it is not a thing- 
substance and there are no qualities, since there can be no dis- 
tinction without relation, no qualities without distinction from 
and relation to one another and to the thing which owns them; 
no thing without distinction from and relation to its qualities. 
On the other hand, if the thing be not identical with its qualities, 
then the thing is a meaningless abstraction, an unknown mysteri- 
ously supporting the qualities. 

The argument that a thing cannot exist as a complex of qual- 
ities, since each quality is other than or different from every other, 
is a mere quibble, if it be taken to mean anything more than that 
the qualities of empirical things are recognized only as discrimi- 
nated and related to one another. ]STo determinate quality, and 
no group of determinate qualities, is known except in relation to 
others. Empirical reality is a system or totality of qualities in 
relation. Furthermore, it is impossible to conceive reality as a 
whole in any other form than that of a system of determinately 
qualified beings in relation. If we are led, when we think out 
the logical implications of experience, to the notion of one world 
ground or cosmical order, that too can only be conceived as 
one ground or order in the sense of being the systematic totality, 
the unitary ground, of finite beings in relation. Thus the abso- 
lute is nothing more than the totality of the related. Such is the 
legitimate argument of the dialectic of experience. 

To return to the problem of the thing and its qualities, a 
"thing" is a name and a concept for an empirical complex of 
qualities. "Apple" is a name for the coherence in one space- 
configuration for several moments of time of a complex of sense 
qualities, or the persistence in time of the coherence of this complex 
in a series of positions. "Apple" is a conceptual name, because 
there are several instances of a similar coherence of similar qual- 
ities in various places and in various times. These cohering 
qualities which are an apple have specific meanings for human 
interests and purposes. So long as the qualities persist in a degree 
sufficient to satisfy these interests and purposes, we call it the 
same thing, and several same things are the same kind of thing. 
When the apple ceases to be edible and salable it ceases, for those 
purposes, to be an apple. When its seeds cease to function as 



184 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

seeds, they cease to be seeds. Thus, the continuous unity and 
identity of the thing consists in the unity and continuity of its 
empirical functions in relation to the interests and purposes of 
men as perceiving, desiring, acting and thinking beings. Hence, 
so long as you can treat a thing as the same, for that purpose it is 
the same. Thus a "thing" is a teleological or pragmatic con- 
struction, by the mind, of the complex data of actual experience. 
Ultimate things or substances could only be those which satisfied 
the most fundamental and enduring purposes of human thought 
and action, or which constituted the final limit to analytic thought. 
If there be any purpose in human thought which is most basic 
and all-inclusive, and if there be any concept of substance which 
satisfies or is the limit of fulfillment of that purpose, this will 
be the ultimate concept of being. 

The concept of substance has its source in the quest for a 
concept of essential being. It was developed to satisfy the de- 
mand of thought for a permanent type of being. There are two 
correlative notions involved in all concepts of substance: (1) The 
notion of a permanent or enduring reality as the ultimate ground 
or subject of the ever-changing complexes of empirical qualities. 
The incessant alterations in the qualitative complexes which are 
empirical things are conceived to be expressions or manifestations 
of a being which endures through all its changing expressions. 
(2) The notion of a self-subsistent or self -existent reality; of a 
reality which, as self-existent or self-caused, is permanent. 

Empirical things are always dependent on their others. They 
have their transitory existences only as determined by the status 
and movement of all other finite beings. Now clearly, perma- 
nence and self-existence are correlative notions. Only that which 
is self-existent can endure permanently, and that which endures 
permanently must be self -existent. When a concept of substance 
is formed, the changing complex of empirical qualities are thought 
of as its attributes or properties. It is the essence of which they 
are the appearances, the reality of which they are the manifesta- 
tions; the ultimate subject of all predicates. 

The logic of Greek philosophy reveals clearly the motives, and 
logically possible points of view, in regard to substance. These 
are: substance is one or many in number, and one or more in 
kind. In early Greek philosophy substance is conceived to be one 
in kind, it is living matter (water, air, fire). Anaxagoras, who 



SUBSTANCE 185 

is a qualitative as well as a quantitative pluralist, conceives it 
to be many in number and many in kind. The atomists, who 
are quantitative pluralists but qualitative monists, conceive that 
there are many instances of the one kind of substance. Plato's 
Ideas are: a plurality of substantial beings and a unifying or 
governing principle, the, idea of the good. Thus Plato combines 
pluralism and singularism. The ideas are the true substances, 
but a dubious sort of being is given to matter, so that there is 
a dualistic strain in Plato and, more strongly, in Aristotle. Aris- 
totle holds that the individual, who is the actual union of form 
and matter, the realized entelechy, is the essential being [to ti 
en einai] or substance. Thus, for Aristotle, there is a plurality 
of real substances. But this plurality has its goal in the seeking 
of the individual to become like the one perfect entelechy, the 
unmoved mover of all things. Aristotle, like Plato, gives to 
matter or potentiality, a quasi self-subsistence. 

In modern philosophy Spinoza is both a qualitative monist 
(in other words his is a double-aspect theory) and a quantitative 
singularist; there is one self-existent all-inclusive being, one sub- 
stance or God. For the dualists, Descartes and Locke, there are 
two kinds of substance, matter and mind; for the materialist, 
Hobbes, there are two kinds of substance, matter and motion; 
for the spiritualist, there is one kind of substance, spirit or mind. 
Berkeley and Leibniz are spiritualistic pluralists. For them 
reality consists of a plurality of psychical centers or monads; 
whatever unity there is in the universe is due to the interaction 
of the monads. Berkeley's pluralism ends in an idealistic theism. 
Leibniz said that the interaction was only apparent in the in- 
terrelations of the monads, which was the consequence of a har- 
mony preestablished by God. Later thinkers who start from per- 
sonalistic pluralism, such as Lotze and James Ward, have dis- 
carded this conception of the windowless monad and admit direct 
interaction implying a common ground or medium. Lotze's 
pluralism ends in a singularism very like pantheism; Ward is a 
theist. Pichte and Hegel, like Leibniz, attempt to harmonize the 
motives of singularistic and pluralistic spiritualism. When the 
pluralist regards the interrelations of the many finite centers as 
implying an absolute ground, he ceases to be a simon-pure pluralist, 
and becomes in some degree a singularist. Indeed, the controversy 
between pluralism and singularism is really a question as to where 



186 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the emphasis is to be strongest, on the distinctness of the many be- 
ings, or on their unity. The singularist tends to slur the unique- 
ness and privacy of the finite self and the pluralist emphasizes it. 
William James, Howison, McTaggart, E. C. S. Schiller, H. C. 
Sturt and others in the volume Personal Idealism; in France, 
C. B. Kenouvier, Henri Bergson and others; and in Germany, 
L. W. Stern are recent exponents of spiritualistic or personalistic 
pluralism; Josiah Koyce, E. H. Bradley and B. Bosanquet, of 
spiritualistic singularism. 2 Modern materialists are atomistic or 
pluralistic in their emphasis, but the doctrine that the one sub- 
stance is the continuous space-filling ether, of which all atoms 
are transformations and transitory modifications would be a ma- 
terialistic singularism. 

We are not concerned here with the question whether all 
reality is of one or more than one kind. That question we shall 
discuss later on. 3 Our present concern is with the logical value 
of the notion of substance for an interpretation of reality as a 
whole. 

The classical criticisms of Locke and Hume on the notion of 
substance 4 are presented to-day from a new angle — the notion of 
substance is that of a meaningless reduplication of the properties 
or attributes which are supposed to inhere in it. If the perma- 
nent self-existing substance be not identical with its attributes, 
it is nothing conceivable and the relation between it and its at- 
tributes is inconceivable. Thus the substance idea is superfluous. 
If substance be simply a name for the sum of its attributes it is 
then neither permanent nor self-existing. Experience does not 
acquaint us with any entity that is absolutely permanent or self- 
existent. Experience is a realm of ceaseless flux, and the only 
permanencies or invariants that science finds in it are those of 
relations of functional interdependence among its data. Sub- 



2 It should be added, however, that spiritualistic or idealistic singularists 
do not deny a relative reality to the human individual ; but Bradley and Bosan- 
quet are very dubious about according to the human person any permanent 
place in the cosmic scheme. This is not at all the case with Eoyce who has 
made the bravest attempt of them all to save the individuality and permanent 
place of the person in the absolute self. In his later works Royce laid in* 
creasing stress on the notion of the absolute as a community of persons. My 
own view is nearest to his. 

1 See Chaps. 21 and 27. 

4 See Locke, Essay, Book ii, Chaps. 23 and 24; Hume, Treatise, Book I, 
Part iv, Sec. 3-6. 



SUBSTANCE 187 

stantiality or permanence, says Cassirer, 5 "signifies the relative 
self-dependence of determinate parts of a functional system ; that, 
in comparison with others, prove independent moments." And a 
functional relation is a correlation between series of empirical 
data. The contents of experience are ever changing, but, in so far 
as we are able to find or put law or order in their sequence, and 
thus group the changing contents into series, we arrive at the 
only sort of permanence and subsistence that scientific thought 
can. get and use. 6 

Soulrsubstcmce, conceived as the permanent and self-existing 
support of the empirical processes of consciousness, really adds 
nothing to our understanding of the actual self. It is only an 
embarrassing superfluity. The more closely we scan the actual 
history of selves, the clearer it becomes that the unity and con- 
tinuity of the empirical self is that of the fluctuating, interrupted, 
and episodic memories, feelings, ideas, and purposes that cor- 
respond roughly with the observed bodily processes. If the soul 
be unchanging, it does not act for the changing consciousness. If 
the soul be simply the relations of functional dependence or order 
in the shifting data of consciousness, it is not a soul substance. 

Material substance is equally useless as a substrate for empir- 
ical physical processes. How is it to be thought of ? Does it pos- 
sess only certain so-called primary qualities, mass, figure and mo- 

6 Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, p. 119. 

"Professor Spaulding, in The New Bationalism (pp. 29, 38 f£., 70 if., 
155 ff., etc.), attributes the aberrations of philosophers in hunting for mare's 
nests, or in dark places for things that are not there, chiefly to the dominance 
of the ancient Greek concept of substance as a " thinglike core" inside the 
empirical qualities. Owing to the baneful influence of the Greek philosophers, 
the thinglike concepts or corelike concepts of substance and cause have misled 
philosophers ever since into thinking of mind and body, spirit and matter, 
as thinglike substances and causes and speculating upon their relations. Thus 
have arisen the foolish and insoluble riddles of the opposition of spiritualism 
or idealism, materialism and dualism. Philosophy can end this endless and 
fruitless debate only by emancipating itself from these childlike notions and 
conceiving reality simply as a functional system of invariant logical relations 
between the varying data of experience. On which charter of freedom and 
progress for philosophy I make two observations: 1. Aristotle analyzes oiaia 
or substance, which for him means being, and finds that it has four principal 
meanings, rb tL ijv emu, or essential being, rb icad6\ov or the universal, rb ytvot 
ofola or the genus, and rb faroKelnevov or the substrate. He identifies being or 
substance with the individual or self -existent, to 2k&<ttov, KdQ&irQ; this is the 
essential being or subject of attributes, not a thinglike core. It is the anion 
of matter and form. 2. Some entity or entities must be self -existent or perma- 
nent; whether minds and bodies, or mind-bodies, or neutral entities, or "an 
unearthly ballet of bloodless' ' relations, this is not the place to consider. 



188 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

tion. Then how can we account for the secondary qualities : sound, 
color, taste, odor, etc. ? How do the primary qualities produce 
the secondary qualities? If the latter are subjective, inasmuch 
as they are dependent upon the reaction of the percipient organism 
to the impact of the primary qualities, then Berkeley's reply is 
in point. 7 Our knowledge of the primary qualities is equally 
dependent upon the reaction of the organism. The primary qual- 
ities are only relatively less changeable than the secondary. As 
empirical data, the primary and secondary qualities are on the 
same level. The primary qualities, supposed to be the attributes 
of material substance, are not the primary qualities experienced 
by us. They are either primary qualities reduced to microscopic 
and imperceptible proportions; or, as in the identification of 
matter with ether, everything experiential is stripped away, leav- 
ing only the bare notion of a continuous space filled with nothing 
conceivable or imaginable. 8 

Thus material substance is a meaningless abstraction that ac- 
counts for nothing. A single neutral substance, conceived as the 
underlying identity of mind and matter, in which are pooled, no 
one knows how, the attributes of matter-substance, and mind- 
substance, is an even more empty and superfluous notion. 

If substance be the unknown support of known qualities, it is 
a useless notion. The business of knowledge is to establish sys- 
tematic correlations of experiential data. Descriptive laws of 
qualitative and quantitative similarities and dissimilarities in the 
empirical sequences of series, and of correspondences between 
series of experiential data, constitute the whole business of science. 
In its only useful sense, substance is thus a misleading name for 
the never-completed sum of the laws of functional correlation of 
experiential data. For the only entities that are permanent are 
the universals and values — in short, the relations which we find 
or put into the ceaseless processes and which give them connection 
or meaning. 

And yet, so irrepressible is the hunger of the mind for the 
concept of permanent and self-existing entities, that we find sci- 

7 Cf. Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, and Three Dialogues be- 
tween Hylas and Philonous. 

8 The real primary qualities are only, to use Locke's term, <l powers' 9 
to produce in the moment of perception the experienced primary and secondary 
qualities. 



SUBSTANCE 189 

entists, after driving out substance, smuggle it in again under 
other names. The atoms, electrons, ether, etc., of the physicist; 
the elements of the chemist ; the colloids, protoplasms and cells of 
the biologist; the sensations, affections, and reflex arcs of the 
psychologist are substances; and there is an inveterate tendency 
to hypostatize even the more general descriptive formulae of causal 
sequence as "laws of nature." Even such tenuous notions as uni- 
versal, relations, values, are hypostatized under other names. 
The Neo-realist, for example, who would banish substances and 
causes, and eviscerate their content into logical "terms" and "rela- 
tions" which constitute propositions and propositional functions, 
says that these bloodless notions subsist although they do not exist. 
He does not tell us what they subsist on. If they subsist on them- 
selves, they are simply our old friends the substances masquerad- 
ing under other names. A self-subsistent entity is substantive. 9 

The truth is, as Kant said : we cannot think the changing with- 
out the permanent. There must be something which changes and 
if change is orderly, that is if it be thinkable, there must be a 
ground or grounds for the order of change. Even the perpetual 
flux and movement of perceptual experience must be the expres- 
sion of the orderly interaction of real entities. Even if change 
were illusory, there must be some permanent ground for this uni- 
versal illusion. Empirical reality is the way in which things 
behave around us and in us. It is the manifestation of a system 
of centers of activity or movement. The substantial grounds of 
experience must be permanent centers of activity in inter-rela- 
tion. This is not the place to consider whether all real beings are 
of one kind. The concept of substance as an inert core or passive 
support of empirical qualities is certainly useless. I doubt if 
any important philosopher ever held it. The true meaning of 
substance is that of a system of particular centers of activity. All 
motion implies activity. 

Since experience is a rich complex of everchanging but orderly 
sequences of qualities in multifarious relations of action and pas- 
sion, the ground of experience must be the interaction of a plu- 
rality of interdependent centers, of dynamic individua. These 
are finite, since each receives from the others limits to its self- 



9 6 1 /. The New Realism by Perry and others; Bertrand Russell 's writings; 
Meinong's writings on Gegenstandstheorie. 



190 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

activity and thus suffers — that is, is passive. There can be no 
determinate changes unless there are determinate beings having 
determinate transactions. The changing complexes of experience 
express their interaction. Whether all real centers of activity 
are reducible to one type (qualitative monism) is a problem that 
I shall consider later; whether all finite centers of activity are 
parts of one all-inclusive active principle (dynamic singularism) ; 
or whether the only unity is that of the system of interacting finite 
beings (dynamic pluralism, personalistic and otherwise) ; or 
whether the plurality of finite centers which constitute our world 
have their ground in one transcendent creative principle (theistic 
monism) will be considered later on. 10 Here it is sufficient to 
say that, since our pluralistic system of interacting individua con- 
sists of finite members, strictly speaking, these are not substances. 
Only the permanent self -subsistent ground or order of the whole 
system is the ultimately substantial or self -subsistent reality. The 
substantial is not something that mysteriously abides behind the 
whole complex of individua. The substantial reality is either, 
just the living order or system of the plurality of finite and inter- 
related centers of action and passion, or the transcendent ground 
of this order which, as known, is manifesting itself in the whole 
systematic order of finite centers. 

10 Part v. 



CHAPEK XVI 

CHANGE AND CAUSALITY 

In popular thought "cause" means something which produces 
something else. The common sense belief is that there is power or 
activity in the cause to bring forth the effect. The source of this 
belief is, without doubt, the feelings of personal effort or activity 
and resistance, which accompany changes produced by us, in our 
surroundings and by our surroundings in us. 

The quest for causal explanation is the application to chang- 
ing experience of the 'principle of sufficient reason. The causal 
principle is an a priori form or category of thought, simply in the 
sense that, inasmuch as we do not ourselves act without ground 
or reason, we suppose there must be a ground for every change 
in the world around us. It was reasonable for primitive man, 
who had not an accumulated stock of carefully analyzed observa- 
tions in regard to the differences between the modes of behavior 
of physical nature and human nature, to suppose that whatever 
occurred was produced by some animated being or spirit acting 
from felt motives. The scientific notions of attraction and repul- 
sion are ghostly relics of animatism. The fundamental distinc- 
tion which has been made, as a result of technical control and 
scientific analysis, between mechanical causation and final causa- 
tion is simply that between unmotivated and motivated causation. 
Teleological interpretation of nature is simply the last refinement 
of animism or animatism. We still use the same term to designate 
changes brought about by inanimate physical agencies and by 
persons. 

Science has progressed, in exactness of procedure and the suc- 
cessful control, through prediction, of natural processes, by ban- 
ishing final causes from the study of nature. Positive science does 
not ask why anything happens in the physical order, but how it 
happens. It is only in social life, in history which is the at- 
tempted reproduction of the social life of the past, and in ethical 

191 



192 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

inquiries ; in other words, it is only where we have to do with the 
attitudes and desires of persons that we now ask why anything 
happens. The precisest possible general description of the orderly 
sequence of actual events is the aim of natural science. For it 
a cause is a uniform antecedent, without which the type of event 
in question does not as a matter of fact occur. While a cause 
is a uniform antecedent, that does not imply that causes and 
effects may not in part be contemporaneous and reciprocating. 

The aim of scientific explanation is to reduce the sequences 
of events, as far as possible, to quantitative ratios. Science does 
not attempt to reproduce the course of the actual world in all its 
bewildering details. It makes conceptual abstractions from the 
teeming complexity of fact. Its end is simplification and pre- 
cision of statement, for the sake of prevision and control. It is, 
therefore, most convenient for science to ignore troublesome ques- 
tions as to the natures of causal agencies ; and to confine itself to 
the description, in mathematical terms, of the functional relations 
of interdependence among the data of experience. In his book, 
Erhentniss und Irrtum, Ernst Mach has stated very clearly the 
view that the vulgar concepts of cause and effect are useless to 
express the functional interrelationships of elements in any com- 
plex phenomenon of change. The concept of function expresses 
much more completely and precisely the mutual dependence of 
elements. All dependences are mutual, and the general permanence 
in the changing relations or interdependences among empirical 
elements are to be expressed as functional relations or equations 
between the elements. For example, in an impersonal complex 
ABC J), A may vary inversely with B, C, or D, or directly with 
B, inversely with C, etc. The problem of science is to formulate 
differential equations for these correlative variations. 

Thus, the chief value of causal explanation lies in the formu- 
lation of approximate regularities or orders of relation between 
qualitatively discontinuous phenomena. 1 

The following are the chief philosophical problems in regard 
to the notion of causation: (1) Is the notion of power or agency 
to be banished entirely from our conception of the world, or has 
it a legitimate place in philosophy? (2) What is the legitimate 

1 On the notion of cause as functional relation see, in addition to Mach 
and the references in the previous chapter, K. Pearson, Grammar of Science, 
third edition; also Avenarius, KritiJc der reinen Erfahrung. 



CHANGE AND CAUSALITY 193 

meaning of the postulate of the uniformity of nature?. Must like 
causes always have like effects ? Or are we to admit a so-called 
plurality of causes and effects, which would be to admit absolute 
contingency into the heart of things. (3) The problem of con- 
tinuity and discreteness or novelty ; in what sense must we admit 
the reality of novel events? (4) How are we to conceive the 
totality of causal interrelations ? I shall now take up these prob- 
lems in order. 

(1) The notion of power or agency cannot be eliminated from 
the interpretation of experience without reducing it to a series of 
groundless and inert dissolving views. Since there is change, 
there is agency. There is a great gain, in simplifying his prob- 
lems, for the physical scientist to banish all troublesome questions 
as to the nature of force, agent, activity; but clearly our richly 
diverse and mobile world is dynamic. Things are doing in it. 
Fire is an agent, since it burns my fingers or my house. Elec- 
tricity is an agent, since it shocks my nerves or kills me and 
propels trolley cars. The quantities for which the differential 
equations obtain in mathematical physics are pure quantities with- 
out qualities. The world of experience is not a series of equations 
or mathematical functions. It is not an unearthly ballet of bloodless 
categories. The basic reality is experience, and the mathematical 
functions of the exact sciences have but a very shadowy resem- 
blance to reality. Since the self is both a doer and a sufferer, 
it must suppose, when it suffers or perceives change, that some- 
thing acts. 

The tendency to shy off from questions as to the real agents 
in nature is a consequence of the lingering influence of the doc- 
trine of mysterious things-in-themselves behind phenomena. Ac- 
tually, things are what they do. Substances,, if not all sentient, 
are at least all agents. Life, for instance, is not a mysterious 
entity. It is a generic term for multitudes of individua which 
nourish themselves, respond in peculiar ways to stimuli, are sen- 
tient and mobile, and reproduce their kind. 

The descriptive formulae of science state the uniformities or 
orderly relations in the behavior of natural entities. But these 
formulae can never embrace or represent adequately the course 
of nature in its concrete complexity. Scientific laws are statistical 
averages for the modes of behavior of large numbers of individua. 
There are individual differences in the qualities even of atoms of 



194 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the same chemical substance, as instanced in isomerism and ap- 
parent exceptions to the periodic law. The differences between 
snch minute individua may be explained, as in the electron 
theory, through differences in the subindividua. But individual 
differences are not gotten rid of; they are only reduced in scale. 
And the more complex the type of entity the greater and more 
significant the individual differences. 

The qualitatively variegated wealth of empirical reality must 
have its grounds in a cosmos of diversified centers of activity. 
The determinate but ever varying complexes of primary, second- 
ary, and tertiary qualities are the joint products of the interaction 
of percipient centers with other percipient and with nonpercipient 
centers. There can be no single type of causation, to which all 
others are reducible. Whenever similar phenomena, recognized 
through memory and record as constituting, together with present 
events, a group of objects that are constituted into a group because 
of the repetition of qualitative and quantitative similarities occur, 
we have a single type of causation. For no actual causal relation 
has any further empirical ground than the recognized repetition 
of similars. In many cases of causation the repetition is confined 
to the recognition of more or less of degree or intensity in quali- 
tative similars. In the field of physical and chemical causation 
alone, approximate quantitative equivalences in the repetition of 
similars are determined. I say "approximate" equivalence; for, 
even in the case of the repetition of the physical measurements 
or chemical equations, we cannot assert absolute identity. Every 
case may have something unique about it. The most we can say 
is that, within certain limits, we have found for the repetition of 
certain qualitatively similar sequences a mathematical correlation. 
The more abstract, that is, the more remote from concrete experi- 
ence and consequently the qualitatively poorer the elements and 
relations are, with which we deal in formulating causal relations, 
the more susceptible these relations are of mathematical statement. 
The relations of electrons and ether, conceptual objects endowed 
only with abstract spatial and dynamical properties, lend them- 
selves readily to abstruse mathematical treatment. They have 
been made by the mind for just that purpose. Molecular elements 
in chemistry, being only one step removed from empirical com- 
binations with perceptible properties, have to be endowed with 
valencies, weights, etc. 



CHANGE AND CAUSALITY 195 

But chemical equations are quite exact, since the molecules 
have been made for that purpose. When we take into account, in 
physiological and psychophysical causation, the actually observable 
results of the interaction of stimulus and sentient organism, we 
are dealing with qualities more nearly in their concrete actuality, 
and we do not get beyond the approximate quantitative relations 
embodied in such principles as the laws of reflex action, the 
Weber-Fechner law, etc. In social and historical causation, where 
we have to do with the interaction of wholly concrete individuals 
and groups of individuals, we are at the farthest remove from 
the mathematical equations of abstract mechanics. The so-called 
exact laws of nature are exact in the degree in which they deal 
with abstract constructions in which the teeming qualitative com- 
plexity of the empirical order has been artificially simplified. 
These laws are, with reference to actual reality, simply more or 
less approximate statistical averages of repetitions of similarities 
in the behaviors of individua. In their formulation the qualita- 
tive differences of the individua are treated as negligible for the 
particular purpose in hand; just as in determining the expecta- 
tion of life at various ages, the mortality tables used by insur- 
ance companies are sufficiently trustworthy practical guides in 
fixing policy rates, provided the statistics on which they are based 
are sufficiently wide in range for the multitudinous small varia- 
tions in the conditions of health, disease, and death to cancel one 
another. 2 

The chief value of causal correlations in any field lies in the 
establishment of an expectation of repetition, of a similarity of 
sequence in events, based on the recognition of the repetition of 
similar sequences of events in the past. In other words, it con- 
sists in finding identical orders of serial dependences among dis- 
tinct events. Since every event is distinct from every other, every 
event must be the expression of an interaction between at least 
two distinct entities. In linking together by the causal relation 
similar groups of events we are not explaining away the unique 
differences which give to events their distinctness. We are not 
accounting for the determinate diversities of the individua, the 
interrelations of which are the grounds of the events. A cause, 

2 Cf. Josiah Eoyce: The World and the Individual, Vol. II, Lectures 
iv and v; and his "The Mechanical, The Historical, and The Statistical, ' ' in 
Science, N. S., Vol. 39, pp. 551 ff. 



196 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

or better, a condition, of a change in one being, does not enter into 
that being and make it over into a copy of the being which causes 
the change. A cause is never more than an incitement or stimulus, 
by which one individual entity or group of entities occasions or 
stirs up reaction in another entity or group of entities. 

Eeality must consist of a plurality of interactive and inter- 
patient centers. The orderly characters of the changes that take 
place in the history of the world means that these centers consti- 
tute a system of entities in reciprocal relationships. These re- 
lationships are the laws of the events of the world's history, but 
the laws do not fully express the complex individuality of the 
world whole, which is the organic, or rather superorganic system, 
of relations holding among the indefinite diversity of its indi- 
vidual elements. The pluralist regards the cosmical unity as 
consisting simply in the mutual relations of its individual mem- 
bers — interactive and interpatient. For him mutuality of stimu- 
lation and response is the ultimate fact of the world. The singu- 
larist or quantitative monist holds that all causal actions and 
reactions among the finite elements of reality are simply compen- 
satory adjustments among the parts of the one absolute or all- 
inclusive being. For him all change consists of internal rear- 
rangements in the one reality, and he finds the best analogies for 
the unity of the one reality in the relations of the aspects of mind 
to one another. The pluralist, on the other hand, finds the best 
analogies for a conception of the world whole in the relations of 
members of a society to one another. The theist is a pluralist 
with reference to the relationships between the finite members 
of the world, but he holds that these relationships must have their 
original and conserving ground in a transcendent principle of 
order. In later chapters I shall discuss these standpoints. 3 It 
will suffice here to point out the differences that result from the 
respective emphasis laid on different aspects of the problem. 
Pluralists, such as Berkeley, Leibniz, McTaggart, agree that the 
world is a cosmos or unitary order. Singularists, such as Spinoza 
and Bradley, hold that the finite elements are genuine constit- 
uents of the absolute, but in the absolute are absorbed to such 
a degree that they appear to lose their distinct individualities. 
Theists try to preserve the distinct individuality of finite entities 

•Chaps. 35 to 38. 



CHANGE AND CAUSALITY 197 

and, at the same time postulate a ground of the order of the 
world which, as existing in itself and for itself, transcends the 
world. Descartes, Berkeley, and Leibniz were theists; perhaps 
Hegel was. Kepresentatives of philosophical theism to-day are 
James Ward, W. E. Sorley, A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, H. Eash- 
dall, and G. H. Howison. Important shades of difference will be 
found among representatives of the various views, but I have 
not space to deal here with their differences. 

(2) What is the meaning of the principle of the uniformity 
of nature? It is, I take it, the postulate that the same causes 
or conditions will uniformly give rise to the same effects. This 
postulate does not imply that precisely the same causes and the 
same effects ever recur. It is a purely hypothetical postulate of 
reason, namely — "if absolutely the same causes should recur, ab- 
solutely the same effects must follow." As we have seen, the 
"laws" of the recurrence of similar conditions, resulting in the 
recurrence of similar effects, are statistical approximations to 
the actual complexity and variation of the world of events. 
The so-called 'plurality of causes in practice means that what 
is for statistical purposes the same kind of event, for ex- 
ample death by natural causes, follows from a variety of events: 
accidents, old age, disease, overwork, etc. ; but, from the stand- 
point of personal relations and perhaps physiologically, no two 
cases of death are ever absolutely the same so that the one could 
be substituted for the other indefinitely. The supreme tragedy 
of our social maladjustments is that the individual is so often 
treated merely as what he is not, namely, as a mere figure in 
statistics. Possibly there is no absolute repetition in the physical 
course of nature; perhaps no two electrons are absolutely alike 
in their situations and behaviors. Indeed, what are singled out 
as causal relations are simply the most obvious and practically 
important repetitions of similarities in events. Our causal de- 
scriptions are artificial simplifications of the indefinite variety 
of events. Every actual causal explanation is relative; not only 
to our meager knowledge of the actual wealth of detail, but as 
well to the particular purpose of our inquiry. For example, one 
man is shot by another. From a legal point of view, the cause 
was the shooter's intent to kill. Prom the psychological and moral 
point of view, it was the shooter's jealousy of the other's attentions 
to his wife. Prom the physiological point of view, it was the 



198 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

impact of the bullet which produced hemorrhage. From the 
physicist's point of view, it was a problem in mechanics. From a 
cosmical point of view, the true cause was the whole state of the 
universe immediately antecedent to the shooting. But the latter 
explanation is no explanation, inasmuch as it would be useless 
for any specific purpose, legal, moral, or medical. 

Empirical reality is creative. It brings forth novelties. This 
is most obviously true of the lives of individuals, the history of 
humanity, the evolutionary order of life. It is also true, if less 
noticeable, of the course of physical nature. 4 If the second law 
of thermodynamics be valid, then the physical universe is actually 
an irreversible order which is running down hill in the direction 
of absolute quiescence and death, unless some superphysical power 
can reverse the gears. From the standpoint of our human ex- 
perience terrestrial history has been a creative process. There 
may be higher beings than man, but, never having been acquainted 
with any of these, I am unable to discuss their characteristics. 
It is impossible for us to be other than anthropomorphic in our 
standpoints. At most, we can only strive for the most purified 
and rational form of anthropomorphism. From this standpoint, 
the approximate goal of terrestrial evolution and human history 
is a process of creation of individuality and realization of per- 
sonal values. The creation or achievement and conservation of 
values in human life has gone forward spasmodically and irregu- 
lar ily, not subject to any definite law that we can figure out. All 
philosophies of history that have attempted to formulate genetic 
theories of progress have failed; from St. Augustine to Herbert 
Spencer. 

But certainly novelties are produced for good and ill; es- 
pecially in the psychical and social orders the principle of creative 
synthesis or creative resultants, as Wundt calls it, holds good. 
Causes are factors combined to produce results which are not the 
arithmetical sum of the qualities of the causes but a new reality. 
Procreation is a familiar example of this. All creative mental 
work is an example. In brief, we may say that the origin 
and development of personalities is the most striking example 
of the creative process of the empirical world. This is taken 

4 If the chemical elements have arisen through intra-atomic changes, of 
which we get glimpses in radio-active transformations; the inorganic order 
is a historical, and perhaps a creative, order. 



CHANGE AND CAUSALITY 199 

by some to imply contingency. If by contingency be meant 
only that we cannot predict the effect by adding together 
the causes, there is a contingency in the sense of the creation of 
new qualities. But, if by contingency be meant that there is ab- 
solute chance operating in the world, in other words that literally 
the same conditions might eventuate in quite different results, 
that some things happen without there being any sufficient ground 
why they rather than their opposites should have happened, I am 
unable to find any meaning in such a statement. If the assump- 
tion be true, our world is a bedlam, and nothing is certainly true, 
not even that the world is a bedlam. The only thing for which 
no ground can be conceived is the ultimate ground or grounds of 
reality. But this is not contingent; it is the ultimate fact. The 
question why being was made, if by being we mean the ultimate 
reality, is nonsense. 

(3) The problem of continuity in causal processes has already 
been raised in our previous discussion. A causal series is ob- 
viously a series of discrete events. Each event in a chain, in 
which each is in turn effect and cause, is distinct and occupies a 
period of duration which is wholly or in part before or after an- 
other event. On the other hand, it seems irrational to draw any 
sharp line of temporal division between causes and effects. When 
the causal conditions of any event are complete, is not the event 
already there ? Empty time can make no difference, but if change 
be absolutely continuous we seem to have no grounds for distin- 
guishing events in a causal series; indeed, no grounds for recog- 
nizing a temporal succession at all. On the other hand, if change 
be not continuous, the causal process must consist of a series of 
jumps from one to another event, between which jumps there are 
no smooth transitions and therefore the intellectual demand for 
continuity is violated. 

It is argued that, since the complete presence of the causal 
conditions of an event is identical with the effect, and therefore 
the time element must be eliminated when the problem of causal 
continuity is thoroughly thought out, the causal relation, to be 
thoroughly intelligible and consistent, must be the phenomenal 
expression of a timeless identity of logical ground and consequent. 
Therefore, the notion of a discrete causal series must be replaced 
by that of a timeless unitary ground. But this argument seeks to 
solve the problem of change by abolishing it, or rather by ignoring 



200 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

it. Either change is an illusion or it is not. If change be an illu- 
sion, either the illusion must be accounted for and then the original 
problem is back on our hands in disguised shape or it is unaccount- 
able ; and then we have committed intellectual suicide at the very 
outset. If it be said that change is not illusory, but is the phenom- 
enal expression of a timeless ground, we are simply cheated with 
words. The problem remains as to how a timeless ground would 
express itself in change. 

The dialectical arguments against the reality of discrete 
change, drawn from the infinite divisibility of a continuously pro- 
jected line, really assume that a temporal series of events is made 
up of a naturally endless number of timeless instants; in other 
words these arguments really assume the empirical reality of 
infinitesimals, which is self-contradictory. Empirical causal 
change is not adequately represented by an absolutely continuous 
line, thought to be produced indefinitely and therefore indefinitely 
divisible. To substitute for empirical change the idea of an indef- 
inite succession of timeless instants is at once to assume and deny 
real succession. 

In the empirical world there is incessant change. What we 
happen to single out as causes and effects, from the rich complex 
of empirical process, are the critically important events from the 
standpoint of our specific purposes. But the only sense in which 
causation and change are continuous is that there is no absolute 
cessation or beginning in the empirical order ; and, therefore, this 
order consists of the continuous interaction or interdependence of 
the elements which make up the world. There are critical points 
in change; such as, for example, the boiling point of water, the 
freezing point, the moment of the fertilization of an ovum, the 
moment of birth, the moment of voluntary decisions, the moment 
of the declaration of war. Critical points are the results of the 
gradual accumulation of small changes, but their actual fruition 
constitute creative syntheses or novelties. 5 Causation does not pro- 
ceed upon a dead level. Causal continuity involves discreteness, 
creativeness. The discrete occurrences which we call causes, or 
effects, according to our point of view, are the critical and creative 

B The discussion of the places of minute variations or saltations (muta- 
tions) in the genesis of biological species is significant in this connection. 
But, logically, the problem is not changed by the degree of the variation. A 
novelty does not cease to be such by being small. 



CHANGE AND CAUSALITY 201 

expressions of the qualitative complexity of interaction and result 
in a world which is constituted by the interplay of a multitude of 
dynamic individua. 

(4) The problem of totality. How is causation to be con- 
ceived from the point of view of the cosmos — of things as a whole ? 
It is argued that the categories of causation and change cannot be 
ultimate points of view, since, if we take them as such, we become 
involved in the so-called endless regress of terms and relations, 
and thus cannot reach the conception of totality. A temporal 
series or order of change is without first or last term, without be- 
ginning or end. In our scientific quest for causal explanation 
we may stop short with the cosmical star dust or electrons and 
the laws of physical motion, simply because we cannot coherently 
imagine conditions precedent to these and from which these 
emerge. Similarly we are unable to envisage concretely a remote 
future ; logically a first cause or a last effect is an absurdity. A 
first cause would be a cause for whose existence and activity no 
ground could be given, an impassable limit to our understanding, 
a nontemporal cause; in other words a cause that is not a cause 
in the scientific sense; it would be a temporal event with which 
time began, but it is nonsense to talk of a beginning before which 
there was nothing. A beginning is a temporal event relative to 
antecedent temporal events. Equally nonsensical is it to talk of a 
last cause or final end-state. In other words, an event which means 
the end of events and of time. Therefore, it is argued, the totality 
of causal changes can only be thought of as a nontemporal ground. 
The bearing of the problem of change and evolution on the con- 
ception of ultimate reality cannot be adequately discussed until 
we have developed more fully our conception of ultimate reality 
and is therefore reserved for later chapters. 6 I may say here, 
however, that the only notion of a totality that seems to me tenable 
is that of a permanent ground of order which prevades and sus- 
tains the whole process of change. In other words, the unity of 
the world can be nothing more than the systematical continuity of 
the whole dynamical system of interrelated elements. The inter- 
activities or reciprocal influences of the world's elements must be 
the direct expression of the world ground. The ground of the 
world whole may be a continuously active principle of order, of 

8 Book v, Chaps. 35-37. 



202 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

which the actual course of the world in all its complex variety and 
novelty is the expression. 

Thus far we have considered causation chiefly in the sense in 
which it is taken in natural science. In this sense it is essentially 
a retroactive standpoint, based on the recognized repetition of 
similar events. Previsions and predictions of the future depend 
for their success on the degree of repetition of similars — in short, 
upon the degree of identity between past and future. This, I take 
to be the essence of mechanical explanation. In so far as the 
career of life, including man's historical career, is the theater for 
the repetition of similars, it is a mechanical career. This we say 
without thereby implying that the forces and behaviors of human 
nature are identical with those of the physical universe. We may 
say that mental habits and routines and social habits (such as blind 
customs and traditions) are the mechanisms of history. Possibly 
the individual life and the social order are chiefly mechanical in 
their operations. Certainly they are largely so; but once in a 
while man, the individual, and men, the society, rebel against the 
mechanical and mechanizing processes; break through the tread- 
mill of the past, to find or create something new which shall be 
better, which shall have unique meaning and worth. Desire, long- 
ing, hope, fear, discontent, rebellion, idealization, purposive striv- 
ing, these human attitudes express various facets of the prospective 
forward living character of human life. In seeking to build better 
mansions for his soul and to build a better soul, man" is striving 
to determine the present in the light of an imagined better future. 
In other words, he seeks to make mechanism subservient to the 
realization of new values or the more effective realization of 
accepted values. The fulfillment of ambition, of love, the quest 
for a better social order, for the salvation of his soul through 
religion or art, are ways in which mechanism is subordinated to 
purpose and value, means of escaping from the thralldom of his 
present by his past through creativity guided by imaginative fore- 
shadowings of a better future. The future is a function of the 
living present ; but, in so far as man successfully strives to break 
through the inherited mechanisms of his past, the vision of a 
better future becomes the most potent determining characteristic 
of the living present. Thus it is a mistake to say that in seeking 
for the country of the future man is sacrificing the real present to 
an unreal future. Of course one may do so by living a life of 



CHANGE AND CAUSALITY 203 

mere dreaming, but the quest for that better country is really the 
re-creation of the present by the liberation of his life from the 
bondage of mechanical repetition. The limits of the validity of 
the mechanical viewpoint are to be found in the scope of life's 
creativeness. 

In so far as life is creative, creative imagination and pur- 
posiveness or teleological activity control the course of change. 
In the order of nature and in the order of human life mechanism 
and teleology seem to be in incessant conflict. The issue is not 
the question of all mechanism versus all teleology, but of the 
subordination of mechanism to teleology. ~Nor does teleological 
control of change imply discontinuous and irrational contingency. 
The continuity of a well-ordered, intelligently directed human 
career, in other words, teleological continuity, is a more compre- 
hensive and higher type of continuity than that of a mechanical 
repetition. The continuity of a living social institution, of a 
cultural movement ; such as a nation, a religion, a historical totality 
of intellectual, moral, and aesthetic culture, is a still more com- 
prehensive and higher type of continuity than that afforded by 
any physical mechanism. Is not then a teleological whole the 
highest type of causal and temporal continuity ; and must we not, 
if we are to think the world a living whole, conceive the world 
ground as a continuing power of organization, a teleological world 
order in which mechanical repetition is subservient to the creative- 
ness of life ? 

The question we have just raised involves a more systematic 
consideration of the concepts of individuality, value, and purpose. 

APPENDIX 

THE KNOWLEDGE OF ACTIVITY 

Wherever there is change there is causality, and wherever there 
is causality there must be some sort of activity. The original source 
of the belief in activity resides in the self's immediate experience of 
its own activity. "We feel desire, impulse, tension, effort. But the 
feeling of effort is not the same as the simple feeling of activity. We 
feel effort only when our feeling of inner movement, of the develop- 
ment of desire and purpose, is blocked, thwarted, or distracted by 
competing interests or external obstacles. Hence, to point to incom- 
ing peripheral sensations from the muscles and inward-pointing 



204 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

sensations of headstrain as the sole sources for our feelings of activity- 
is beside the mark. The feeling of activity is not exhausted by the 
elimination of these sensations. It may be objected that we are not 
to take an unanalyzed feeling of being alive and active as a primitive 
revelation. No; but the analysis into peripheral and central bodily 
processes leaves a remainder — the immediate feeling of consciously 
developing movement directed towards an end. This is particularly 
evident in rationally directed will-attitudes in which the higher 
thought processes are involved. The whole feeling of a self, as living 
and developing in its appetitive and purposive life, is identical with 
the feeling of self -activity. The feeling of activity is the sense of 
the inner development of the conscious and purposive life itself. We 
do not infer that we are active because we are alive. We are con- 
scious of self -originating process and development with direction, fol- 
lowing hard upon desire and interest, or, it may be, precisely con- 
temporaneous with these. If cogitans sum is an immediate fact of 
introspective experience agens sum is a more catholic statement of 
the same inner immediacy. To experience one's life is to experience 
activity, since it is to experience self-directed change. To desire and 
aim, and to move toward the accomplishment of one's desire and aim, 
is to experience the original nature of activity. 

If it be objected that, since all ideas are passive, we can have no 
idea of activity, I reply that one might as well argue that an idea 
of a fat ox must be a fat idea. An idea of a quality or relation does 
not have to be the identical quality or relation of which it is a true 
idea. If activity is the immediate awareness of the self as consciously 
alive one must always have at hand a nascent consciousness of what 
it means, even though one cannot draw a picture or diagram of it. 

It may be said that all one can really find when one introspects 
are kinesthetic sensations in muscles and sensations of headstrain, 
and therefore the supposedly spiritual effort of attentive and con- 
structive thinking is the reflex of bodily processes. One can only 
speak for oneself in regard to the findings of introspection. I do 
not find sensations of tension and strain in the head, pointing inward 
and backward, to be all that there is when I retrospectively consider 
my own processes of intellection and conation. There are times, 
when all distracting stimuli being absent and all consciousness of 
bodily processes dampened, I have a feeling of unimpeded thought 
activity, of the flow and constructive rearrangement of images and 
concepts devoid of any sensory elements beyond the vague visual 
motor and auditory images of the words which symbolize the concepts 
involved. In other words when, at specially favorable times, thought 
moves towards its goal without any accompanying sensations of ob- 



CHANGE AND CAUSALITY 205 

struction, conflict or tension, there is a feeling of -unclouded intel- 
lectual activity. 

The immediate sense of self -activity is the root of our notion of 
immanent activity in things. We project activity into other beings 
wherever we observe motion and change. When the self, in its ac- 
tivities, experiences obstruction, strain, effort, in carrying out its 
aims, its immanent activity becomes transeunt activity. Transeunt 
activity is the meeting of two or more immanent activities, the rela- 
tion of active centers which obstruct or reinforce one another's 
activities. 

This is not the place to discuss the question whether spiritual 
or psychical activity may not be the ghostly mirage of the activities 
of nerve-cells or atoms, that is, an illusory epiphenomenon. This 
raises the whole question of mechanism and teleology in metaphysics. 
I may remark, however, that until we are offered convincing evidence 
that the prima facie experience of personal activity is a deception 
we are entitled to accept it as a datum. Such evidence has not yet 
been forthcoming. 7 

1 On self -activity see especially James Ward, article ' ' Psychology ' ' ; 
Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., Vol. XXII; William James, A Pluralistic 
Universe, Appendix B, "The Experience of Activity"; Ibid., Psychology, 
Vol. I, Chap. 11, " Attention, ' ' especially pp. 447-454 ; and Vol. II, Chap. 
26, "Will." For criticism of activity see Bradley, Appearance and Beality, 
passim. 



CHAPTEE XVII 

INDIVIDUALITY, VALUE, AND PURPOSE 

In Book IV we shall consider in extenso the nature of the 
human individual and the place of value and purpose in human 
individuality, in society, and in relation to the cosmic order. 
Here I shall give only general definitions of these categories and 
a summary account of their interrelationships. 

An individual is a concrete existent whose determinate nature 
is a complex pervaded and controlled by an internal and self- 
possessing principle. In so far as a living organism is a unitary 
whole whose life activities are controlled by a single principle, it is 
an individual. A cell or even an atom may be considered as a 
sub-individual or lowest type of individuum. A human self or 
mind-body, being a unity that feels, perceives, thinks, and acts as 
a single self-possessing, self-maintaining, self-developing whole, 
is the highest type of individual in the empirical order. The unity 
of the self is primarily a unity of feeling and volition, secondarily 
a unity of cognition. I am not ready to admit with Eoyce that a 
self is always constituted by a single plan of action in the sense of 
a unity of conscious purpose. It is difficult to find and keep to a 
single integrated plan of conscious action in life. I know that T 
am a unity of feeling in the sense that all my feelings are mine. 
I know too that all my thoughts are my thoughts. I know, like- 
wise, that I have never been quite able to subordinate all my 
activities into a single plan; that, with reference to action, I am 
much at the mercy of circumstances. It seems to me that to say 
that a self is constituted by a single plan of action would be to 
deny that many selves are selves. 

However socialized, as members of the universe, my thoughts, 
interests, and aims may become, they are mine. Social ideals and 
principles, however impersonal, and universal interests and aims, 
have no existence or meaning, except as issuing from and referring 
back to the felt unity of the individual self. I cannot admit the 

206 



INDIVIDUALITY, VALUE, AND PURPOSE 207 

inference that Bradley, Bosanquet, and others of the school of 
objective idealists make that, as human individuals develop in 
rationality, sociality, . and value, they transcend their individuali- 
ties or personalities. Bosanquet conceives feeling as being just the 
difference that a universal content of thought and purpose makes 
to us as individuals. Like Hegel, he rather depreciates feeling, 
which is the psychical root of personality. He says that where 
we are strong we come together ; in social work, art, religion, and 
science. True, but it is we, as distinct and poignant individualities, 
that come together ; and our strength, when we do come together, is 
the combined strength of unique persons, of distinct and separate 
centers of feeling, thought, and action. The more human persons 
learn to think, to feel, to act, together for social and universal 
ends, the more individually distinctive and unique do they become. 
It is the unorganized, inchoate, undeveloped self that is easily 
submerged in the mob consciousness. It is the unthinking or 
defective mind that is submerged in the crowd mind. The mob is 
made up of selves with little selfhood. The crowd mind is made 
up of minds who either have little mentality or whose mentalities 
are in a state of suspended animation. The higher, the better 
organized and more rational the self, the more distinctive and 
strong the personality. The best organized, the most compre- 
hensive, the richest, the most coherent and dynamic type of being 
that we can think is a society of free self-determining personalities. 
Therefore, the highest and most adequate criterion of value is to 
be found in the conception of a society of rational individuals or 
persons. It is the highest criterion of value, since one cannot 
conceive or imagine anything richer in content and meaning than 
a society of integrated selves ; each possessing wealth and harmony 
of feeling and rational insight ; each having the power of sustained 
action in rational cooperation with all the others, to further 
achievement of those ends which promote the spiritual enrichment 
and harmonious intercourse of its members one with another; a 
society of individuals enjoying and loving nature, and mutually 
free intercourse, feeling beauty and seeing meaning in their 
inward lives as well as in their outward relations, and successful 
in making themselves at home in their physical environments. 

Personality or rational individuality is the most comprehensive 
criterion of value; since truth is simply the harmonious corre- 
spondence of the perceptive and rational powers of the self with 



208 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the order of reality; since beauty is the harmonious warmth of 
feeling which free contemplation of other lives yields to a self; 
since goodness is the harmonious integration of the affective and 
active tendencies of a self within itself, with other selves, and with 
the universe. Truth, beauty, and goodness are generic expressions 
for the chief aspects of the harmonious integration, social integra- 
tion, and integration with the universe, on the part of human 
persons. 

The ultimate ground of values or teleological order can be 
nothing other than the cosmic principle which makes possible the 
achievement and conservation of personal values. Every sort of 
order, whether physical, vital or human, is a system of individuals 
or quasi-individuals. A physical order is a system of dynamic 
centers of physical qualities or modes of behavior ; a vital order is 
a system of organic individuals in dynamic relations to one another 
and to their physical conditions of existence; a human or social 
order is a system of dynamic relations between human selves. The 
orders that exist in nature or in human society increase in sig- 
nificance and value just in proportion as their constituent members 
increase in wealth of content and in harmony. Social and rational 
individuality or personality is the highest and most comprehensive 
type of value that we know. Therefore the supreme ground of 
values must be a superpersonal order. 

But purposiveness seems to be a mark of imperfection, to imply 
always an unrealized end, an ideal which is not yet fact or reality. 
And the realization of the end involves the use of means or mechan- 
isms, which are given independently of the end and which may 
not serve as ready instruments for the realization of the end. If 
means and end were wholly harmonious there would be no dis- 
tinction between them ; they would be timelessly identical. There 
would be then no striving and the idea of purpose would be an 
unmeaning superfluity. Thus, if the real universe be perfect, it 
cannot be a purposive or teleological whole. All values are 
eternally realized. On the other hand, if purposive striving have 
any real significance, the universe is not perfect. If the universe 
be not perfect, the values which purposive activity aims at may be 
perpetually doomed to defeat, and even to extinction. In short, 
when we attempt to conceive reality as a teleological or significant 
whole, we find ourselves confronted by a dilemma — either the 
whole is now as always perfect, and purposive activity is a vain 



INDIVIDUALITY, VALUE, AND PURPOSE 209 

shadow in which men walk; or purposive activity really achieves 
new values and then the nature of the whole is imperfect and the 
issues of the purposive activity which it contains are uncertain. 
Thus we are brought to the problem of the place of significant 
history or evolution in ultimate reality — a problem to which we 
shall devote a later chapter. At this point I wish to show simply 
that the notion of teleology or purposiveness is subordinate to the 
notions of value and personality. 1 

I shall take as my guiding conception the notion that value 
is always a quality of spiritual selfhood or personality, regarded 
as essentially involving membership in a spiritual community. 
Then I think we may see that ceaseless striving for unrealized 
ends, endless effort in short, is not the highest mark of value in 
an individual or in a communal life. In the enjoyment of beauty 
in nature and in art we do not strive, in the contemplative posses- 
sion of truth we do not strive, for ulterior ends. In the life of 
affection, of love and friendship, we do not strive ; in short, in the 
highest, most self-sufficing and selfless activities and experiences 
there is no purposive effort to realize as yet unachieved values. 
Beauty is its own excuse for being. The contemplation of truth 
and the interpersonal life of affection are surely, too, their own 
excuses for being. With respect to these inherently worthful 
attitudes and experiences, with respect to the selfless contemplation 
of beauty, and of rational order, as with respect to unselfish 
human affection, we can say with Tennyson: 

Our wills are ours, Oh Lord; 

Our wills are ours to make them thine. 

Since we are finite and imperfect beings living in a world of 
change, we never wholly escape from striving and willing, from 
setting up ends and devising means ; but, in the possession of the 
highest values, of those values which are our most significant and 
most real living, we escape from the treadmill process of the 
striving will. In the fruition of value, and of personality in and 
through value, purposive conation ceases. As Dr. Bosanquet 
puts it : "If it (the principle of teleology when applied to cosmic 
theory) is to retain a meaning, it must abandon the whole analogy 



J I beg to refer particularly to the very fine treatment of the idea of 
teleology in Bosanquet 's: The Principle of Individuality and Value, 
Lecture iv. 



210 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

of finite contrivance and selection and must fall back on the char- 
acteristics of value which is, apart from sequence in time and from 
elected purposes, attached to the nature of a totality which is 
Perfection." 2 "In extending the idea of teleology to the universe 
as a whole we are turning from the question whether this fact or 
that has the appearance of being contrived for a purpose, to the 
question whether the totality — contrivance or no contrivance, and 
without any suggestion of dividing it into part which is means 
and part which is the end — can be apprehended or conceived as 
satisfactory, that is, as a supreme value." 3 "And we see again 
that the true 'end' or value does not lie in this special relation to 
a terminus or a finite purpose, but in a character of perfection, 
which may in finite experience be relatively present throughout 
a process, or as a persistent result of it, or at the beginning of it, 
or at the middle." * "The great enemy of all sane idealism is the 
notion that the ideal belongs to the future. The ideal is what 
we can see in the light of the whole, and the way in which it shapes 
the future for us is only an incident — and never the most impor- 
tant incident — of our reading of past, present, future in their 
unity." 5 "Things are not teleological because they are purposed, 
but are purposed because they are teleological." 6 "We can freely 
suppose the world plan to be immanent in the whole, including 
finite mind and also mechanical nature." 7 "The foundations of 
'teleology' — really individuality — in the universe are far too 
deeply laid to be explained by, but, still more, to be restricted to, 
the intervention of finite consciousness. Everything goes to show 
that such consciousness should not be regarded as the source of 
teleology, but as itself a manifestation, falling within wider mani- 
festations, of the immanent individuality of the real. It is not 
teleological, for the reason that as a finite subject of desire and 
volition it is 'purposive.' It is what we call purposive because 
reality is individual and a whole, and manifests this character 
partly in the shortsighted and eclectic aims of finite intelligence, 
partly in appearances of a far greater range and scope. The large 
scale patterns of history and civilization are not to be found as 

2 Ibid., p. 126. 
*lbid., p. 127. 
4 Ibid., p. 131. 
6 Ibid., p. 136. 
6 Ibid., p. 137 
*Ibid., p. 146. 



INDIVIDUALITY, VALUE, AND PURPOSE 211 

purposes within any single finite consciousness; the definite con- 
tinuity and correlation of particular intelligent activities, on which 
the teleological character of human life as a whole depends — the 
'ways of Providence' — are a fact on the whole of the same order 
as the development of the solar system or the appearance of life 
upon the surface of the earth. It is impossible to attribute to 
finite consciousnesses, as agents, the identity at work within finite 
consciousness as a whole. This identity is exhibited in the devel- 
opment which springs from the linked action of separate and 
successive finite consciousnesses in view of the environment. 
Every step of this development, though in itself intelligent and 
teleological, is in relation to the whole unconscious ; and the result 
is still a 'nature' though a second and higher nature." 8 "And 
with the mention of history and the time and place of a man's 
birth we come to Teleology above finite consciousness. In history, 
or in what is greater than history, the linked development of art 
or ideas and religion, the principle of a teleology beyond, though 
exhibited in finite consciousness, is clear and unambiguous. It is 
not finite consciousness that has planned the great phases of 
civilization, which are achieved by the linking of finite minds on 
the essential basis of the geological structure of the globe. Each 
separate mind reaches but a very little way, and relatively to the 
whole of a movement must count as unconscious. You may say 
there is intelligence in every step of the connection ; but you cannot 
claim as a design of finite intelligence what never presented itself 
in that character to any single mind. The leader of a Greek 
colony to Ionia in the eighth or ninth century, b.c, was certainly 
paving the way for Christianity ; but his relation to it, though in 
a higher way of working, was essentially that of a coral insect to 
a coral reef. Neither Christianity nor the coral reef were ever any 
design of the men or insect who constructed them; they lay 
altogether deeper in the roots of things ; and this, as I hold, carries 
with it the conclusion which in principle must be accepted about 
evolution." 9 In brief, they builded better than they knew. 
"Teleology does not come out of the empty mind ; it is the focusing 
of external things together until they reveal their internal life." 10 
The principle of value then is identical, in the human order 

8 Ibid., pp. 152-153. 

9 Ibid., pp. 154^155. 

10 Ibid., p. 166. 



212 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

and in the universe, with the principle of spirituality or person- 
ality. And the meaning of the latter is the organized spiritual 
harmony which is found and enjoyed in the greater experiences of 
life — in an impulse from a vernal wood, in the devotion of comrade 
to comrade, of lover to the beloved, of man to God, of the artist 
and the art lover to beauty, of the scholar and the thinker to truth, 
of men in general to justice and fellowship in the social order. 
Teleological interpretation of the universe means really an axio- 
logical interpretation, an interpretation in terms of value and per- 
sonality. The notions of purposive striving, willing, of ends and 
means, are subordinate to the notions of value and personality. 

From our standpoint reality at its highest level is a community 
of persons, an order of individuals. From this standpoint natural 
law or cosmical law has not the position of a legislative principle 
imposed upon the constituent individuals which make up the 
universal order. The elements of reality are not mere exemplifica- 
tions of natural laws. The laws of physics, chemistry, biology, 
psychology, sociology, are formulations of the various subordinate 
orders, or regular modes of behavior, of individuals in relation. 
Natural law is an abstract or partial statement of the order that 
does obtain in the relations of individuals; legal and moral law 
of the relations which should but do not always obtain. In both 
types a law is an abstract partial statement of an order and of the 
relations of individuals as members of an order. 

The ultimate problem of philosophy is that of the place of 
personality in the cosmical order; the problems of the value of 
personality and of the value of existence as a whole are but two 
aspects of this fundamental problem. One's conception of the 
value of existence must grow out of his conception of the place of 
personality in the cosmos; and on one's conception of what per- 
sonality is and what nature is depends one's conception of the place 
of personality in the cosmos. We shall next consider the nature of 
nature, with special regard to the place therein of life and mind, 
making no attempt to formulate more than an outline philosophy 
of nature. This will furnish a background for a more detailed 
consideration of the nature of personality ; then we shall be ready 
to face, as best we can, the last riddle of the sphinx — the place of 
personality in the cosmos. 



BOOK III 
EMPIRICAL EXISTENTS 



CHAPTER XVIII 



SPACE AND TIME 



Hitherto we have been considering the more formal or logical 
features of reality. Identity and diversity, discreteness and con- 
tinuity, individuality and universality, number and quantity, 
order, causality and substance, are the most fundamental logical 
features of the structure of reality as a whole. Any universe, and 
any partial system not a universe, must, in so far as intelligible, 
be a system of entities in relation and therefore be discrete and 
continuous, individual and universal. Any universe must be an 
order of entities in relation and therefore denumerable. For 
number is essentially an orderly determination in formal or ab- 
stract time, and expresses nothing but the ordered series of enti- 
ties. Time is the order of succession or before and after. Space 
is the order of simultaneity or coexistence. The concept of num- 
ber, we have seen, arises through the analysis and synthesis of 
qualitative differences in experience, and the application of number 
to things requires the recognition of qualitative likenesses and dif- 
ferences. Numerical order and magnitude are the most formal 
and abstract ways of discriminating and relating, in terms of dis- 
creteness and continuity, the qualitative wealth of empirical 
reality. Numbering is the formulation of an order system of rela- 
tions for the qualitative complex of empirical reality. It is through 
time and space that identity and diversity, the individual and the 
universal, number and quantity and the other categories become 
concrete. Regularity of space relations is one determinate aspect 
of the regularity, or the relation of order, which is the final ground 
of number and mathematics. The regular order of temporal suc- 
cession is an abstractive construction from experience symbolized by 
number series. 

In passing from identity and diversity, continuity and dis- 
creteness, through number, to space and time, we are following the 
order of increasing concreteness or specification in our considera- 

215 



216 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

tion of the structural character of empirical reality, and our next 
step, after considering space and time, will be to consider things 
and persons. We are not here attempting to deduce concrete 
reality from the concepts of identity and diversity, for we have 
insisted all along that these formal concepts are built up by the 
analytic-synthetic activity of intelligence operative in the organiza- 
tion of experience. 

Common sense thinks of space and time as substances or real 
existents, in which things are contained and events happen. The 
Newtonian doctrine of absolute space and absolute time, which 
seems to have generally prevailed among physicists up to the 
advent of Minkowski and Einstein, is but a mathematical extension 
of the common sense view. Empty space and empty time are taken 
to exist independently of things and events. Berkeley criticized 
severely Newton's doctrine of absolute space, time and motion. 1 
For Berkeley, of course, space is nothing but the order of coexist- 
ence, and time the order of succession, in the ideas of finite spirits. 
Liebniz held that space is the order of coexistence among the 
activities of the monads, and time the order of succession in the 
activities of the monads. In his controversy with Samuel Clarke, 
the disciple of Newton, Leibniz argued that Newton's doctrine of 
absolute space and time would make Cod a finite being conditioned 
by space and time. I hold that Leibniz's theory is, in principle, 
correct and that it has been vindicated by the recent development 
of the physical theory of relativity. 2 Space and time are relative 
to the changes and experiences of finite beings. What may corre- 
spond to them in the supreme order of the universe, or in other 
words, what may be the ultimate ground of the space and time 
orders, I shall consider briefly at the end of this chapter and more 
fully in Chapters XXXV and XXXVII. 

The chief questions, for philosophy, in regard to space and 
time are these: (1) In what sense are space and time real? (2) 
Are they relative or absolute? (3) Are they boundless and in- 



1 See Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, paragraphs 110-117, 
123-132; and Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. 

2 The best brief treatment of the relativity of space and time in its gen- 
eral philosophical and historical aspects that I am acquainted with is Dr. H. 
Wildon Carr's, The General Principle of Belativity. On the philosophical 
bearings of the Einstein theory I have found two good brochures in German — 
Moritz Geiger, Die philosophische Bedeutung der Relativitatstheorie ; Ernst 
Cassirer, Zur Einstein' schen Relativitatstheorie; both of date 1921. 



SPACE AND TIME 217 

finitely divisible or have they bounds and ultimate elements (points 
and instants) ? (4) How are they related? Are they correlative 
or independent dimensions? All these questions are interwoven. 
The answer to one implies answers to the others. If, for instance, 
as I shall argue, space and time are relative, they are real as 
aspects or attributes of existence ; but they cannot be independent 
entities. If they are both relative and real, they may be, in some 
sense, finite and correlative. 

Zeno, the Eleatic, developed the contradictions in regard to 
motion and change involved in admitting the reality of space, time, 
motion and multiplicity. Since his day philosophers and mathe- 
maticians have puzzled their heads over the questions of the 
boundlessness of space, the endlessness of time and the existence 
of the infinitesimal. Zeno's conclusion from his paradoxes was that 
motion, change and multiplicity are illusory. Kant, in his mathe- 
matical antimonies, gave a fresh statement of the contradictions 
involved in thinking space and time as absolute. 3 Kant admitted 
the universal empirical validity of physics and mathematics ; so the 
only way out of the deadlock for him was to say that space and 
time are universal forms of finite experience, but not conditions 
of the existence of noumenal realities or things-in-themselves. For 
Kant the noumenal entities — God and the free and immortal soul 
— are, theoretically, mere hypotheses that give completeness to 
thought; they are regulative ideals. Practically they are postu- 
lates of moral faith. But Kant does not attempt to render an 
intelligible account of the relation of the spatial-temporal world 
of nature to the timeless and spaceless noumena. His idealistic 
successors struggled in vain with this problem. F. H. Bradley 
shows that, if space and time be taken to exist as such, they are 
riddled with contradictions ; therefore they are mere appearances. 4 
But Mr. Bradley does not explain what place these appearances 
have in the timeless and seamless whole of the absolute. M. 
Bergson resolves the contradictions by making space and time to be 
intellectual distortions of the true reality which is duration or 
change ; but he does not seem to find any place for a supertemporal 
order. 5 Mr. Bertrand Russell finds the solution of Zeno's 



* See Critique of Pure Season, Second Division, Book ii, Chap. 2. 

4 See Appearance and 'Reality, Chaps. 4 and 18. 

5 See Time and Free Will, Chap. 2 ; and Creative Evolution, especially pp. 
325-330. 



218 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

paradoxes in the new mathematical theory of continuity. Space 
and time consist of discrete points and instants. These con- 
stitute compact infinite series; thus, in any finite portion of 
space and interval of time there is an infinite number of 
points and instants ; between any two points or instants there 
is always another; thus, there is no next point to any point 
and no next instant to any instant, although there is nothing 
between any two points but points and nothing between any 
two instants but instants. A finite space is traversed in a 
finite time because there is a one-one correspondence between the 
infinite series of points and instants which make up, respectively, 
the finite stretches of space and time. 6 To me this solution is no 
solution, since I do not understand either how an actual stretch of 
space can be made up of an innumerable number of dimensionless 
points or how an actual interval of duration can be made up of an 
innumerable number of durationless instants. 7 

The first step towards a clear understanding of the problems of 
space and time is to distinguish between three ideas that are fre- 
quently confused : ( 1 ) the spatial and temporal attributes or quali- 
ties of our experience (of both sense data and data of introspec- 
tion) ; (2) mathematical or conceptual space and time; (3) 
physical space and time. I proceed to discuss the distinctions and 
relations between these three sets of ideas. I ask the reader to bear 
in mind that while, for brevity of statement, I speak of "empir- 
ical," "conceptual" and "physical" space and time, these distinc- 
tions refer, not to different entities, but to different modes of 
thinking space and time. There can be only one ultimately real 
or existent space and time — the physical or cosmical space and 
time. I leave, for later consideration, the question of the relation 
between "subjective" or "mental" time and cosmical time (Chap- 
ter 37). 

I. Empirical Space and Time 

The spatial and temporal attributes of sensory and introspective 
data. All the data of experience have duration or protensity. 
They are events, which occur and recur and extend over one 
another. They have empirical simultaneity and successiveness. 

"See Bussell, Principles of Mathematics, Chap. 42, and Our Knowledge 
of the External World, Chap. 5. 

7 See further Appendix to Chap. 35: "The Infinite." 



SPACE AND TIME 219 

Some of these data have extensity or voluminousness. The data of 
sight, touch, kinsesthesis, taste and smell directly, and of sound indi- 
rectly by association, have voluminousness. I think that certain 
inward experiences of thought and feeling are devoid of extensive 
quality, but certainly our bodily feelings, pleasurable and painful, 
seem to have extensity associated with them. So far as concerns 
the external world, at least, our data are both extensive and pro- 
tensive; the facts of nature are space-time facts. The things we 
perceive as extensive coexist and succeed one another ; they endure 
and they change. The repetition of empirical data leads us to 
believe in the permanence or per duration of objects; a physical 
object is a thing that endures 8 or recurs in different event-settings. 
Empirical extensions and durations are finite and hetero- 
geneous or discrete. ]STo two stretches of experienced duration or 
extensity, or perhaps one might better say no two stretches of 
extensity-duration, are precisely alike. It is obvious that our 
experiences of our durations as living constitute a succession of 
heterogeneous specious presents strung together in memory. It is 
not so obvious, but it is none the less true, that the extensity quali- 
ties of experience are heterogeneous. The extensity quality of 
vision is not the same as that of touch, taste, or sound. Even the 
tactual qualities yielded by the tip of the finger and the tip of the 
tongue in the exploration of a cavity in a tooth are discrepant. 
The space of a dream is discontinuous with the space of a waking 
experience. I need not multiply instances, from the psychology of 
space perception, of the heterogeneity of empirical space qualities. 
Similarly, the duration qualities of experience are notoriously 
heterogeneous. One lives much faster in one hour than in another. 
Suppose fifty people hear a lecture, of which the clock time was one 
hour. There may be fifty different experienced durations. One 
person may have thought the clock time of the lecture about ten 
minutes and another person may have thought it about ten hours. 

II. Conceptual Space and Time 

How do the concepts of one homogeneous and unchanging 
space-whole and of one continuous and evenly flowing time order 
arise from the multiplicity of heterogeneous perceptions by indi- 

8 See Dx. A. N. Whitehead 's very striking analysis of nature as duration, 
in his Principles of Natural Knowledge and The Concept of Nature. 



220 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

viduals ? I think it is obvious, upon a little examination, that the 
mathematical concepts of space and time are the last steps in the 
construction, by analytical abstraction and synthesis, of the notion 
of a common world order which has its roots in the needs, postu- 
lates and conventions of the social life. The individual finds him- 
self from the outset, in a social world — a world of interplay be- 
tween himself and other selves. He is prone to take every other 
center of action and resistance to be a self. He must imagine and 
conceive a common space as the theater of interaction between 
selves. The other self and himself meet constantly in conflict and 
in cooperation. As his field of actual and possible social interplay 
is enlarged, just so his concept of the common space whole is 
widened. As his social contacts increase in variety, depth and 
orderliness, just so his concept of a common space grows in refine- 
ment and stability, grows as an instrument of practical and logical 
manipulation. 

Similarly with time. The individual's consciousness of his 
own lived duration is enriched through social interplay. His own 
duration overlaps and is overlapped by the durations of other 
lives. The sequence of the generations, the rise, persistence and 
decay of custom and tradition, at first orally and later by written 
record, enlarge his consciousness of duration. The history of his 
physical environment is closely interwoven with the history of his 
family, tribe, city, state and nation. Thus man's time conscious- 
ness is enlarged, until finally the origin and evolution not only of 
the human race but of the whole life process is interwoven with 
the history of the universe. From the Alcheringa myths of the 
central Australian savage down to the latest form of the evolution 
theory the notion of the time process keeps step with the develop- 
ment of the concepts of social life and order. As a social indi- 
vidual man is under the practical necessity of marking off briefer 
and longer rhythms of durations. If he were a hermit animal he 
would need to take note only of the cruder physiological and sea- 
sonal rhythms. But as a social being he must have a time for 
everything — a time to eat and sleep, to work and play, to go to 
school, to marry, to conduct public affairs, to pray, etc. ; yes, even 
to tinker at the social order itself. 9 In order that men may co- 

9 On the history of the time concept compare the article by James T. 
Shotwell: "The Discovery of Time" in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology 
and Scientific Methods, Vol. xii, pp. 197 ff., 253 ff., 309 ff. 



SPACE AND TIME 221 

operate they must agree upon methods for measuring intervals of 
duration. All the methods and standards of time measurement, 
from the hour glass and the clepsydra to the apparent diurnal mo- 
tion of the fixed stars, consist in closer approximations, by means 
of a nearer approach toward an invariant rhythmical movement, 
toward an invariant order of succession. Every improved measure 
of time is an asymptotical approach, by social convention, to the 
ideal limit of an absolute rhythmical movement. 

Time is measured in terms of space and space in terms of 
time. Strictly speaking, all determinations of space and time must 
begin from the "now-here" of the individual. "Here" is "now," 
and "now" is "here"; thus the simplest fact of experience is a 
space-time fact — "an event particle," as Dr. Whitehead puts it. 
But, for all social purposes, we must assume that the empirical 
space of the individual is continuous, respectively, with the spaces 
of other coexisting individuals and his time coincident with their 
times and continuous with the durations of succeeding individuals 
and groups. Thus I believe that the space-time of my here-now 
is a component of the one space-time whole of contemporaneous 
"nature" and "society"; and that the duration of my here-now 
is a moment in the one continuous temporal order. The space 
order is conceived to be reversible and therefore absolutely con- 
tinuous, whereas the time order is irreversible and therefore, thus 
far, discrete. This difference is due to the fact that there lingers 
in our most abstract notion of time a vestige of the experience of 
life as a succession of heterogenous specious presents, whereas pure 
space is abstract simultaneity. On the other hand empirical space, 
like empirical time, involves heterogeneity. The differences be- 
tween two nows in an individual or between the contemporaneous 
nows of two individuals may be no less a spatial than a temporal 
difference. What I feel now may depend on where I am, just as 
truly as where I am depends on what I feel. The rawest facts, the 
hardest data of experience, are space-time facts. 

Mathematical or pure space and time are conceived to be homo- 
geneous, absolutely continuous, infinitely divisible, and, respect- 
ively, boundless and endless. There are no heterogeneous heres 
and theres, rights and lefts, in pure space ; no discrete nows in the 
even flow of pure time. Pure space and time are simply the last 
stages in the setting up, by analytic abstraction and synthetic con- 
struction and for social purposes, of absolutely homogeneous space 



222 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

and time. The empirical space and time orders are eviscerated 
of all sensuous and dynamic content and are conceived, re- 
spectively, as a three dimensional reversible order and a one 
directional irreversible order. The order of simultaneous relations 
becomes the space of pure geometry. The order of pure succession 
becomes the time of arithmetic. A conceived realm of pure posi- 
tions and directions, of positions occupied by nothing and of direc- 
tions in which nothing moves but pure movement, is of course 
logically continuous and boundless, to any extent one pleases. 

An order of succession in which nothing succeeds anything else 
except pure moments is of course logically continuous and endless, 
according to the rules of the logical game. But such a space and 
time exist only in the mind of him who thinks them. They are as 
absolute as one pleases because there are no inconvenient facts to 
mar their absoluteness. An infinite continuous order of dimen- 
sionless points has nothing to do with actual space. An infinite 
continuous order of timeless instants has nothing to do with actual 
time. The development of logically consistent systems of geometry 
which set out from definitions and postulates other than those of 
Euclidian geometry affords capital illustration of the nonactual 
or nonempirical character of pure space ; and the paradoxical de- 
velopments of number theory, with its transfinites and new 
infinites, illustrates the nonactual character of pure time. In the 
realm of pure formal logic we have to do simply with highly con- 
ventionalized symbols, with nonexistent terms and relations belong- 
ing to purely speculative games. I may remark, in passing, that 
the traditional metaphysician who develops a camel out of his 
inner consciousness would be much more at home among specu- 
lative mathematicians than among philosophers of to-day. It is 
possible to continue the process of abstractive construction to the 
point of developing space theories from which the qualities of 
empirical space have vanished, and to construct theories of number 
from which quantity has vanished. Indeed these things are being 
done. 

I do not, of course, mean that the conceptions of one limitless 
and continuous space whole and of one evenly flowing and limitless 
time are created out of nothing for the satisfaction of social needs. 
What I do mean is that the absolute homogeneity, continuity and 
limitlessness, of pure space and time are the results of a convenient 
abstraction from the heterogeneity and discontinuity of the actual 



SPACE AND TIME 223 

spatial and temporal orders. All that is local and particular is 
thought away and the abstract forms (the Kantian intuitions) of 
space and time are set up as real entities. 

III. Physical Space ant> Time 

I mean by physical space and time objectively real space and 
time, and I propose to show: (1) that they are both correlative 
and relative, (2) that they imply a trans-spatial and super- 
temporal order. 

Whatever be the case with regard to mental durations, it is 
certainly true that physical durations are extensive as well as pro- 
tensive. In nature time is the soul of which space is the body, 
as Dr. Alexander picturesquely puts it. 10 The events of nature 
endure and pass, but they are never disembodied events. By 
abstractive construction there are formed timeless spaces for time 
systems ; and, as Dr. Whitehead says, "A point is really an abso- 
lute position in the timeless space of a given time system. 11 But 
dimensionless points and timeless instants are metaphysical non- 
entities. Whether the same is true of spaceless duration remains 
to be seen. I have already called attention to the fact that our 
estimates of space and time are relative to one another and I shall 
not labor their correlativity here. Both Dr. Whitehead and Dr. 
Alexander have, from different points of approach, abundantly 
established the correlativity of space and time. The physical 
theory of relativity involves the same conception, but I think it is 
unfortunate that Einstein and his disciples speak of time as the 
fourth dimension of space, thereby confusing the actual correla- 
tivity of space and time with the dubious notions of non-Euclidian 
hyperbolic space. 12 Space and time are correlated aspects of 
nature, but if one of these aspects be more fundamental than 
another it is time or duration. Nature is, as Dr. Whitehead puts 
it, passage or creative advance. On the other hand, nature is not 
passage so swift that mind cannot grasp or think it. The passage 
of mind back and forth through the successive and overlapping 
events of nature is so much swifter than the passage of nature that 

10 See his Space, Time and Deity, passim. 

II See his The Concept of Nature, especially Chaps. 3, 4 and 8. 

12 1 am unable to attach any definite meaning to a nonuniform space. 
Space as a whole cannot bend ; a curved space is a contour or spatial relation 
of something spatial, that is, material, not of space itself. 



224 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

mind is able to identify or recognize, in the recurrences of events, 
'permanences. The permanences in the qualities and relations of 
natural events constitute the objectively real space order. Space, 
as a human idea, is the imaginative and conceptual way of cog- 
nizing the order of coexistence in the qualities and relations of 
nature. Time, as a human idea, is the imaginative and conceptual 
way of cognizing the orderly succession in the passage of nature 
and its creative advance, and in the passage of human nature and 
its creative advance. 

The paradoxes of Zeno, the Kantian antimonies, the Bradleyan 
doctrine that space and time are mere contradictory appearances 
and all theories of a similar character, have their roots in the 
assumption that, if space and time are real, they must be absolute 
entities. Such notions arise from hypostatizing the abstract con- 
structions of pure mathematical space and time. In order to find 
a common basis for action and thought, man has assumed that his 
systems of reference for estimating motion, velocity, distance and 
magnitude are absolute and has set up as metaphysical entities the 
mere abstract frameworks of his movements and calculations. 

I will not enter here into an extended account of the physical 
theory of relativity. The literature on this subject is abundant. 13 
Moreover, I have no competence to discuss the more recondite 
physical and mathematical aspects of the subject. It seems clear, 
however, that the result of the famous Michelson-Morley experi- 
ment implies that we have no means of finding an absolute stand- 
ard for the measurement of movement. All our estimates of move- 
ment are relative to our systems of reference. This has long been 
recognized to be true for every sort of movement except that of 
light, which has a constant velocity of 300,000 kilometers per 
second. If I were traveling east in a train going at the rate of 
sixty miles per hour and a train should pass in the opposite direc- 
tion at the same rate it would for me be going twice as rapidly. 
If I were walking toward the back of the car at the rate of four 
miles per hour the west bound train would not be going quite as 

13 See A. Einstein, The Theory of 'Relativity; A. Eddington, Space, Time 
and Gravitation; M. Schlick, Space and Time in Contemporary Physics ; C. D. 
Broad, " Euclid, Newton and Einstein/ ' in Hibbert Journal, Vol. xviii, 
1919-1920, pp. 425-458; and the symposium by Eddington, Eoss, Broad and 
Lindemann in Mind, Vol. xxix, pp. 415-444. 

A simple introduction to the subject is E. E. Slosson's Easy Lessons in 
Einstein. 



SPACE AND TIME 225 

fast. If the train be moving along the equator, the portion of the 
earth over which I am traveling is going westward at the rate of 
1000 miles an hour. For an observer outside the earth I would 
be traveling west at 940 miles per hour. The earth is traveling 
around the sun at the rate of 18.6 miles per second. The solar 
system is traveling through space in some direction at an unknown 
velocity and at this point our system of reference reaches a limit. 
We substitute one system of reference for another until we come 
to the end of our tether. I need not multiply examples of the 
relativity of our estimates of spatial movement. Inasmuch as we 
measure temporal change in terms of spatial movement the rela- 
tivity of space measurements carries with it the relativity of time 
measurements. We have no means of measuring simultaneity 
except the empirical one of simultaneous light signals; but there 
can be no absolute simultaneity for observers transmitting and 
receiving signals if they are on different platforms moving rela- 
tively to one another, and therefore with different systems of 
reference. The apparently constant velocity of light is, according 
to Einstein, due to the deformation of the axes of coordination 
used by one observer as seen by another. "Thus to an observer in 
a system moving relatively and uniformly to us at half the speed 
of light our proportions are foreshortened to half what they appear 
to us, so that measuring the propagation of light our unit is double 
that of his, and his is correspondingly half that of ours. Each 
observer, therefore, finds the light propagated at the same velocity 
of 300,000 kilometers a second, but the kilometers used by the one 
appear to the observer in the rapidly moving system elongated to 
double their length, and those used by the observer in the rapidly 
moving system appear halved in their proportion to the observer in 
the slow moving system." 14 

If a passenger in a smoothly traveling train watches a stone 
dropped from the train it seems to him to describe a straight line. 
For an observer in a position on the bank fixed with reference to 
the train the path of the stone is a curve. If two observers at equal 
distances from a point on an electric railway see a flash at that 
point they see it at the same instant, but if two observers equi- 
distant on the electric train see the flash it will not be at the same 
instant, since, during the propagation of the light, one observer 

14 Carr, The Principle of Belativiiy, pp. 134, 135. 



226 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

will have moved away from it and another towards it. There is no 
absolute simultaneity. Two events which are simultaneous for 
observers on one system of reference are successive for observers on 
another system of reference. 15 And we have no absolute system 
of reference. From our system of reference on the earth the 
firmament appears to be moving and a falling apple appears to 
move with it towards rest on the earth. But for an observer at rest 
outside our system, and for whom the earth and its surrounding 
bodies are rotating, the movement would appear to be that of the 
earth towards the apple. We have learned to think of the earth as 
moving and the firmament as at rest. But we have no criterion of 
a system at absolute rest. Theoretically, it is just as correct to say 
that the station and the landscape move past the train as it is to 
say that the train moves past them, that the earth moves toward 
the apple as that the apple moves toward the earth. The relativity 
of space and time measurements to the systems of reference of the 
observer means that empirical space and time are really the orders 
in which observers perceive and estimate the relations of coexist- 
ences and successions in the data of their experience. If there 
were no observers in the universe the nonsentient things that were 
left might still coexist and succeed one another in certain orders, 
but we can form no conception of what these orders might be since 
every actual order of coexistence and succession is a perspective 
from our own system of reference. 

On the other hand, it is an error to infer, from the relativity of 
our human estimates of velocity or space-time, that space and time 
do not involve anything invariant or absolute; or that they are 
merely "phenomenal" in the sense of "unreal." The new theory 
of relativity, if I understand its import, is a mathematical method 
of transforming sets of equations for one system of reference into 
sets for other systems of reference. This method implies the 
reality of an invariant order. I cannot find any meaning in the 
assertion that space and time are phenomena, unless I am told what 
they are phenomena of. To say that space is the appearance of the 
intercourse of coexisting real being is just to say that space is the 



15 We can conceive an observer moving away from the earth with a speed 
in excess of the velocity of light. For him our time order would be reversed. 
See Chas. Nordmann, La Mecanique D 'Einstein in Revue des deux Mondes, 
Vol. lxv, p. 15. Oct. 1921, pp. 925-946. 



SPACE AND TIME 227 

appearance of an extended world order. The real world has ex- 
tensity. Similarly, onr part of the universe, at least, is on the 
move ; it has a history ; every member of it has a history ; therefore, 
time is real. 

To say that space and time are correlative is simply to say that 
the actual world system is not something which exists without 
change. There is no existent that does not traffic with other exist- 
ents in time. If there be a God who is more than an otiose abstrac- 
tion, who really does deeds, He too must traffic in time. 

Is objective physical space a thing, a quality, or a relation ? It 
cannot be a thing or substance since, if it were, other things could 
not occupy it, since a thing is a center of inertia. The physical 
principle that two things cannot occupy the same space simul- 
taneously means that whatever occupies space has inertia or mass, 
in other words consists of centers of force. But to identify space 
with mass or force would be to deprive ourselves of any means of 
relating masses. In other words, if we identify space with the 
things which occupy it, we have no means left of relating the things 
with respect to position, motion, mass. Empirical things are com- 
plexes of sense qualities; but abstract space is neither a complex 
of sense qualities nor a simple sense quality. It is true that we 
speak, in psychological analysis, of visual and kinesthetic spaces, 
and of their fusion in the genesis of space perception, but these are 
abstractions which presuppose a common notion of spatiality or 
extensity. Obviously there is not a single homogeneous spatial 
quale possessed in common by all our extensive sensations. If 
space were a complex of sense qualities, we should be able to show 
how it is generated from simple sense qualities not possessing 
extensity attributes. As I have said above, we must distinguish 
between extensity and geometrical space. Extensity is an attri- 
bute of sense percepts, which is just as irreducible as color, sound, 
taste or smell, and is more comprehensive, since the quality of 
extensity is found with all the other attributes. A sense percept 
is, in Berkeley's words, a congeries of sense qualities ; and one of 
these qualities, namely extensity, is always present. The corn- 
presence of extensity with other qualities is, together with its 
relatively greater susceptibility to precision of treatment, the 
reason why science is prone to attempt to account for all other sense 
qualities in terms of extensity factors ; but, if extensity is always 
present with other sense qualities, it is equally true that some other 



228 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

sense qualities are always present with, extensity; so the attempt 
to explain all other qualities as merely variations in extensity is 
foredoomed to failure. All sense qualities are equally real. If 
one were blind one could not perceive color, but if one were com- 
pletely paralyzed one could not perceive extensity since kinesthetic 
experience is fundamental in the perception of space. Geometrical 
space results from building up, out of the concrete extensities of 
sense percepts, a system of abstract relations. Geometrical space 
exists only as a mental abstraction, but concrete extensities exist 
objectively; and persist, that is, have duration. Space then must 
be a complex of relations. It is the tridimensional and reversible 
order of relations between coexisting things. It is the way in 
which the system of simultaneously existing entities appear to the 
mind. Positions, directions and distances are the persistent rela- 
tions between the plurality of existing things. Such relations as 
above and below, right and left, east and west, before and behind, 
distance and magnitude, imply the existence of the objects thus 
related in the specious present or "now" ; and the continuance of 
such relations presupposes the temporal continuity of the things 
related. Space relations imply the permanence of objects in time 
relations. On the other hand, time relations involve space rela- 
tions, since the notion of a "now" or specious present implies a 
coexisting plurality of entities. Space, then, is the manner or 
form in which the reversible relationships or order of a system of 
simultaneously existing force centers appears to the finite self. 
Empirical or psychological space is a relational complex built up 
by the correlation of visual and tactual extension. It is in the 
sense that the attribute of extensity belongs to these perceptual 
experiences and that the mind can abstract and correlate the ex- 
tensity factors that space is native to the mind. Mathematical 
space is of empirical origin, but the data from which it is built up 
belongs to the sense percepts, and the modes of operation by which 
it is built up belong to the mind. Similarly with time. 

There is nothing in the origin and use of our space ideas to 
justify the assumption of a self -existing entity called space. We do 
not need it for any practical or scientific purpose and it is certainly 
a stumbling block in the way of metaphysical synthesis. 

I do not mean, by saying that space and time are relative, that 
we can deduce them from nonspatial and nontemporal relations. 
As Dr. Alexander well says, "Kelations in Space and Time are 



SPACE AND TIME 229 

themselves Spaces and Times." 16 I would prefer to say that they 
are spatial and temporal relations. 

Matter is not in space, as though these were two distinct 
entities. Whatever is material is spatial and vice versa. There 
can be no empty space. Matter is space, but it is never mere space, 
since the concrete extensities which are material endure, move and 
change. Thus matter is spatial-temporal. If there are immaterial 
entities which are not in space (as Lotze contends in regard to 
thought) then they have protensive but not extensive qualities-in- 
relation. 

Real space then is the order of coexistence or empirical simul- 
taneity among bodies or event-particles and systems of event-par- 
ticles. Whenever there are bodies there are space relations. 
Physical space and time are no more and no less real than bodies, 
which are systems of moving particles or event-particles. 

Dr. Alexander argues that if time were nothing more than bare 
time it would consist of perishing instants. The mere temporality 
of time leaves no place for its continuity. Space saves time from 
being a mere now. In order that time should linger space must 
recur, a point must be repeated in more than one instant. 17 

Conversely, in order that space may have distinction of parts, 
may be more than a mere blank, there must be time. Space is 
generated by time. It is the trail of time, the "body" of which 
time is the "soul." By itself each consists of elements or parts 
which are indistinguishable so long as the elements of the other 
are excluded. 18 I understand this to be his way of saying that, 
whereas we can construct timeless spaces for various time systems, 
and can have as many time systems as there are configurations of 
movement and as many space and time measurements as there are 
systems of reference, the latter are all finite sections of the one 
whole of space-time, the one dynamic or moving configuration of 
reality. I would say that all finite time systems and space orders 
are perspectives of the one cosmic order, which is spatio-dynamic, 
or, if you like, is body-soul. The enduring character of the cosmic 
order is time and eternity. 

In the one cosmical order there is no timeless space, no pure 
instantaneity, and no spaceless time or ghostly duration. 

* Space, Time and Deity, pp. 165, 166. 
11 Ibid., pp. 45-49. 
**Ibid., pp. 60, 61, etc. 



230 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

Where I quarrel with Dr. Alexander is with respect to his 
notion that space-time is an adequate description of the whole. It 
seems to me that to speak of the whole order of the universe as 
space-time is, either to empty reality of everything but its thinnest, 
most vacuous and formal aspects, or else it is to import into the 
concept of space-time all the empirical and transempirical bits of 
sens 3d qualities, life, mind and the works of mind. If Dr. Alex- 
ander means to load his space-time whole with all these qualities, 
then it is rich enough to stand for reality as a whole but it is a 
very unusual use of terms. * 

One can conceive that truth and other values, such as afTec- 
tional and some aesthetic values, for example those of music, are 
not spatially conditioned. But I, for one, find it impossible to 
conceive a purely nonspatial existence. I can conceive, although 
very vaguely, a mind which is not externally bounded and limited 
by space, which grasps as a totality what are for us finite minds 
the indefiniteness or boundlessness of space relations in one intui- 
tive insight; but such a mind would be trans-spatial, not non- 
spatial. Thus an over-self might transcend our spatial order, by 
grasping as one individual totality the existence of the whole in 
which we are limited elements. The increasing power of the 
human mind to master and pervade space relations does give us 
some positive hint of the possible character of such a space-pene- 
trating perfect self. 

Time is not a thing, nor a single sensory quality. It is a 
relational order of all our experiences. Time is the way or form 
in which the continuous succession of events or durations appears 
to the finite self. It is the irreversible series or order of events. 
Time is not a single sensory quality, since we cannot separate it 
from or range it alongside of or fuse it with other sensory quali- 
ties. That sensory and affectional qualities of experience change 
in time, means that they are in a definite order. To say that 
events happen in time is simply to say that they occur in an 
irreversible serial order. Temporal order cannot be generated 
from any combination of nontemporal entities. The notion of 
temporal order is derived from the self's recognition of the suc- 
cession of its own discrete experiences or interpenetrating dura- 
tions. "Always to perceive the same thing and not to perceive 
are the same thing," said Hobbes. Always to perceive the same 
thing, if it were possible, would certainly mean not to have any 



SPACE AND TIME 231 

sense of temporal succession. On the other hand, in order to 
recognize the discrete succession of events as a succession, the self 
must be conscious of its own continuity through change. The 
notion of the irreversible order of temporal events, then, is a 
direct derivative of the self's awareness of its own living con- 
tinuity through change. The recognition of an objective time 
order is due to the self's recognition that it is a self only as a 
member of human society and of the universe. 

Since a self has his own private experiences of succession and 
duration, his own psychical tempo which he projects backwards 
and forwards from the specious present or "now," his "now" 
contains, in its memories of the past and its expectations of the 
future, the experiential basis for all individual estimates of time 
and duration. But, just as the individual would never be able 
to distinguish and apprehend his own position in space without 
reference to the simultaneous positions of other beings, so he would 
never be able to apprehend his own present, past, and future 
without reference to the presents, pasts, and futures of other 
beings. In the present moment the individual can transcend the 
present moment. In so far as he identifies himself in thought 
with a telluric or cosmic social order, he transcends the temporal 
limitations of his own life, entertains the notion of an all-em- 
bracing temporal order; but he does not thus become timeless. 
He can think truths and other values that are free from temporal 
limitations, but he cannot conceive a real existence that has no 
positive relation to the temporal order. A cosmic self might not 
be limited by time. Time could be in him, not he in time. He 
might hold the endless temporal order together in one continuous 
insight, as we hold fragments of our duration together in memory. 
Thus time to him would not be endless in the sense of stretching 
indefinitely and unknowably behind and before him. Since he 
would be the unceasingly active and unchanging ground of the 
world order, the cosmic temporal order would be the form of his 
ceaseless energizing. The past of the whole universe would exist 
for him and in him as a function of his immediately present self- 
activity. The future of the whole universe would exist for him 
and in him, inasmuch as he would be the ground of the whole 
system of real possibilities open to the finite members of his uni- 
verse. 19 

19 See further Chap. 37: "Perfection and Evolution." 



232 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

Dr. Whitehead criticizes the conception of a material which is 
in space and in time, on the ground that if space and time are 
entities independent of material then space-time relations cannot 
be attributes of matter. In short, if matter and space-time are in- 
dependent of one another, then the physical order cannot be de- 
scribed in terms of the spatial and temporal relations of matter. 
The criticism is valid against the notion that matter and space- 
time are independent entities. But the minimum meaning of 
matter is just that it occupies space and changes its contours or 
form qualities and its other qualities in space. Physical space is 
just the order of the simultaneous contours of matter. Conceive 
the systematic relations of material particles as instantaneous and 
you have timeless space. Physical time is just the order of change 
in the contours and the qualities of matter. Thus matter and 
physical space and time are not independent entities. Matter is 
spatial because space is material and time is physical because 
matter changes. Matter is but a name for the permanent quali- 
ties and relations of dynamic and coexisting beings and time is 
but a name for the duration and succession of their activities. 

The problems of the infinite divisibility and extensibility of 
space and time result from taking the formal orders of coexistence 
and succession as objectively continuous entities. If what really 
exists now, or at any other moment, be a definite assemblage of 
individua, the complex spatial relations between these would be 
resoluble, if one had suflicient sweep and penetrative power of 
analysis, into simple or immediate relations ; and since there must 
be a finite number of individua, there must be a finite number 
of relations. A cosmic self would not need to count these rela- 
tions ; for, by hypothesis, he would be the absolute ground of the 
determinate system or order of the relationships between the de- 
terminately existing number of individual beings. Space is finite, 
since it is but a system of relations between the actual number 
of existing finite beings. A human being cannot help imagining 
a finite cosmos as bounded by empty space, since he cannot depict 
the whole system of coexisting finite beings except as bounded. 
He cannot do otherwise since he cannot intuitively grasp at one 
blow the whole system; he is a finite member and therefore can 
have only an incomplete although progressing grasp of his rela- 
tions to the other finite members of the world system. For a 
cosmic experient, on the other hand, the whole system in all its 



SPACE AND TIME 233 

details and relations might be continuously present in one space- 
transcending insight. Similarly, the succession of events must 
be a determinate order. The immediate ground of this determi- 
nate order of events must be the interactions and interpassions of 
the individual members of the world order. The ultimate ground 
must be the world order itself. The infinitude or endlessness of 
this world order would be simply the eternal creating and con- 
serving self-activity of the world ground. The finite individual 
is conditioned by the cosmic temporal order and the cosmic spatial 
order, which are to him boundless and endless respectively, since 
he is a finite member of the cosmic order. Thus the eternal 
world ground would not be conditioned by the temporal order. 
He would transcend time, in the sense that the endless succession 
of durations in the finite members of the world order would 
continuously depend on his sustaining activity. 20 

What are the relations of the indefinite multitude of individual 
space perceptions and time perceptions to the cosmical space and 
time orders ? The former must be series of perspectives or points 
of view, taken throughout the histories of percipients, of the one 
objective or cosmical order of coexistent relationships among finite 
existents and of the one cosmical order of succession in the his- 
tories of finite existents. My perception of space relations, here 
and now, must be a fragmentary, and, therefore, but partially true, 
perspective of the real existence now of things in their totality. 
I enlarge and improve this perspective, by taking account of more 
comprehensive social and physical relationships, but my spatial 
perspectives must always remain fragmentary. Individually and 
socially these perspectives are good so far as they go, but they 
must always remain imperfect. As social beings, the most that 
we can do is to attain more comprehensive and harmonious series 
of agreeing but fragmentary perspectives of the total system of 
reality. Similarly, we can enlarge and render more consistent 
our temporal perspectives. Thus, our individual perspectives of 
time and duration, enlarged and harmonized through social co- 
operation and communion, become relatively less inadequate com- 
mon perspectives of the one cosmic temporal order ; but as to how 
far the widest sweep of our historical and evolutionary perspec- 
tives are valid views of the cosmical temporal order, we may never 

20 See further, Chap. 3 ? 



234 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

know. The individual's space and time perspectives, as corrected 
and enlarged through spcial communion, attain higher degrees of 
truth. But in this matter, as in all matters that deal with ultimate 
problems, we must remain content with approximations by slow 
degrees to an ultimate truth which in its concreteness and totality 
remains always beyond our grasp. 

Conceptual or mathematical space and time are, as we have 
seen, the results of social thinking, of the cooperative efforts of 
the human mind to approximate more closely to the objective 
order. The histories of these concepts shows that clearly. The 
greater the degree of precision that we can introduce into our 
physical standards of time measurement, the closer will be the 
approximation of our conception to the presupposed objective 
cosmical order; but the degree of such approximation is always 
limited by the condition that we must depend upon the data of 
our sense organs and the relativity of our systems of reference for 
the materials of our judgment. By the use of mathematical 
methods we may approximate more closely to the objective order. 
From empirical space and time perceptions we form, by social 
cooperation and by intellectual construction, more nearly invari- 
ant standards of measurement. As Poincare says: "We seek 
the invariant laws which are the relations between the crude facts 
of nature." The possibility of translating things from one space 
order into another implies the existence of an invariant order; 
similarly with time. Moreover since, as we have seen, the recog- 
nition of a spatial order presupposes the recognition of a temporal 
order, the presupposition of our quests for more accurate spatial 
and temporal determinations is an absolute invariant order, an 
eternal order as the basis of the objective or cosmical temporal 
order. The conception of an objective and uniform order of 
temporal sequence is the consequence of comparing a num- 
ber of ordered series of changes with one another and of es- 
tablishing a one-one correspondence between them. For example, 
I find a one-one correspondence between the acts of my daily 
routine and clock time, and between clock time and sidereal time. 
As Natorp remarks: 21 "The possibility of objective temporal de- 
termination depends upon uniformity and continuity in change 
and the objective temporal sequence of events is a logical construc- 

21 Die logischen Grundlagen der exdkten Wissenschaften, p. 345. 



SPACE AND TIME 235 

tion of events in one temporal order." But the one temporal 
order is the eternal order, which our empirical time determina- 
tions presuppose — an absolute and eternal order. 22 

Every attempt to solve the space-time problem by separating 
empirical space-time, dubbed "subjective," from physical space- 
time, dubbed "objective" and conceived as an abstract order or set 
of mathematical laws, breaks down. Every empirical space-time 
is a fragment of the ultimate space-time order seen in perspective 
from the view-point of a finite percipient. All the empirical 
space-time facts are real; they are fragmentary and momentary 
views of the one ultimate order — the Order of the Universe — 
which is not space and time added together but one systematic 
totality, one dynamic and continuous system. Extensity and 
Duration are aspects of the One Order which are distinguishable 
in thought but inseparable in fact and reality. The universe is 
an order manifested as Space-time, but it is very much more; it 
is a living super-organism or community, of which Extensity and 
Duration are but poor and formal aspects. 

APPENDIX 

dr. Alexander's theory of space-time 

I cannot undertake here a full critical consideration of Dr. Samuel 
Alexander's fascinating theory of space-time as the absolute or ulti- 
mate of ultimates in his massive and stimulating work: Space Time 
and Deity. I must be content to set my own view in relation to his 
by a few critical remarks. Dr. Alexander conceives space-time, or 
the endless motion of extended substances or materiality, as the all- 
inclusive reality. For him, time is the "soul" or moving principle 
of space and space is the "body" of time. Thus the fundamental 
reality consists of ever-changing spatial contours. Within this all- 
inclusive and ever-moving extensive reality there emerge, by compli- 
cation, a series of ascending orders of empirical qualities: first, the 
secondary qualities of our empirical order, such as color, sound, tem- 
perature, taste and odor; second, by further complication, the vital 

22 In addition to the references already given, the following are especially 
important: Boyce's discussion in The World and Individual, Vol. II: the 
writings of Charles Benouvier; a valuable discussion will be found in A. O. 
Lovejoy's articles: "The Problem of Time in Becent French Philosophy/' 
Philosophical Review 1917, Vol. xxi; and "The Place of the Time Problem 
in Contemporary Philosophy," Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scien- 
tific Methods, 1910, Vol. vii. 



236 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

qualities or behavior of living matter; third, by a further complica- 
tion of vital behavior, the qualities of sentience or feeling and cona- 
tion. (Thought or cognition for Dr. Alexander is delayed or sus- 
pended conation.) Values, in his system, are not empirical qualities 
but products of feeling and conation in interaction with their physical 
medium. It is a fair presumption, says Alexander, that, just as 
secondary qualities have emerged from primary, vital from secondary 
and sentient or mental from vital, by complication, so higher em- 
pirical qualities than mind are emerging in the endless movement of 
space-time. The divinity of the universe or God in the making, the 
God that always is to be but never is, is the emergence of empirical 
qualities higher than mind. We cannot know what these are, since 
we are only finite minds, but we may infer that finite mind is the 
"body" of which God, or the complex of higher qualities in becoming, 
is the "soul," just as finite mind is the soul which emerges from 
organic bodies and as life is the soul which emerges from a specific 
complication of secondary physical qualities. I shall not here discuss 
the question whether it is not a radical confusion of counsel to call 
Deity the supermental qualities which may be emerging from a 
complication of finite minds but never fully emerge; in other words, 
whether a God that never is but is always becoming or to be is 
properly called God or Deity. 

Doctor Alexander seems to me to have shown that in reality the 
space-time aspects of the empirical world are inseparable. With 
respect to the physical world his saying that time is the soul of 
which space is the body is a figurative expression of a profound truth. 
I do not think that he succeeds in his attempt to demonstrate that 
space without time would have only one dimension; although I do 
hold that the recognition of two or more dimensions involves a 
temporal element and thus extensity and time are tied up together. 
Where I fail completely to follow Dr. Alexander is in his attempted 
deduction of the various orders of empirical qualities from pure 
space-time. I cannot understand how, by any conjuring trick of the 
mind, secondary qualities can be shown to "emerge" from mere space- 
time or vital and sentient qualities from secondary physical qualities. 
Dr. Alexander denies that his system is a materialism since, in the 
cardinal instances of life and mind, these qualities are not caused 
by their primary and secondary substrata but emerge by "complica- 
tion." Life, in his terminology, is the "enjoyment," in a new simpli- 
fication, of a complex of secondary qualities; mind is the enjoyment 
of that specific complex of vital qualities which constitutes innerva- 
tion, the basis of consciousness. This attempt to distinguish between 
emergence and causation and to argue that, since life is the enjoy- 



SPACE AND TIME 237 

ment by color, sound, et cetera, of itself, therefore life is not the 
caused product of material motions; and, because mind is the enjoy- 
ment by itself of an innervation Complex, therefore mind is not the 
caused product of innervation, seems to me a verbal quibble. If life 
emerges from a physical order in which there was no life, and mind 
from that particular complication of the physical order which is 
vitality, then we have a new materialism. In view of the historical 
meaning of terms why cheat ourselves with words? In spite of his 
protestations, Dr. Alexander's imposing and ingenious attempt to 
deduce all the empirical qualities in existence from pure space-time 
is materialism. Now, if materialism be the most cogent philosophy, 
in other words the philosophy which on empirical and rational 
grounds carries the heaviest weight of evidence to our minds, we 
ought to accept it. To say why it does not carry this overweight 
to me would be to attempt to condense the whole course of the pres- 
ent work. In the interests of brevity I must be content to say here 
that space-time are two correlative aspects of reality. But reality is 
not now and never was pure space-time. Higher orders of empirical 
existence and value are not deducible from pure space-time. Space- 
time is too abstract, too thin, too mechanical in the geometrical sense, 
to constitute the stuff of reality, a primal motion-stuff in which emerge, 
by its thickening-up, all the higher orders of existence. Dr. Alex- 
ander's space-time, regarded as the primal motion-stuff, seems to me 
strangely like the fire of old Heraclitus and the fine fiery essence 
of the Stoics. Alexander's space-time is a materialistic absolute 
stated in terms of modern kinematics. If mind and life emerge by 
a process of blind complication from a physical or kinematical world 
in which mind and life were not already operative, then mind and 
life are by-products of matter in motion and the latter has the 
strange property of condensing or concentrating itself into forms of 
existence which do not obey or even respect their parent, since they 
do not obviously behave according to the principles of kinematics and 
physical dynamics. The issue seems to me clear-cut between Dr. 
Alexander's theory and any theory which would be adequate to all 
the facts. Life and mind are efficient factors in the universe, and 
factors whose modes of behavior are not charted in kinematics. If 
it is asserted that life and mind have been produced from space-time, 
what we have served up, in the interests of a specious continuity of 
doctrine garbed in quasi-mathematical phrase, is the assertion that 
an abstract universe of moving extensity has given birth to a hier- 
archical series of concrete realities whose significant qualities and 
increasing values are entirely other than moving extensities. 



CHAPTEK XIX 

PHYSICAL REALITY 

I shall use the term "primary physical reality" to designate 
all data of sense. These data, of course, actually exist for selves 
only in the moment of experience. In the absence of any percipi- 
ent these data exist in the form of possible objects of perception. 

1 assume that our minds are in our bodies. 1 The human body 
I assume to be the medium of communication between the mind 
and the remainder of physical reality. In the broadest sense of 
the term I mean by "physical reality" or "nature" all that is either 
experienced, experienceable, or conceived as logically implicated in 
experience, by other minds as well as by one's own mind. Thus, 
physical reality is a social reality. Its very recognition as a public 
reality implies the recognition of the existence of other selves. 
And in turn the recognition of other selves implies the existence 
of a public realm of sense perceivables or "sensibilia," inasmuch 
as one can know another self only through physical intercommuni- 
cation. If there were only one self in the universe, for him there 
would be no distinction between mental or subjective and physical 
or objective reality. 2 Mental or subjective reality, by contrast, 
includes everything that is not an actual or possible public sensory 
datum; namely all personal feelings, private attitudes and acts. 
Of course, we infer from their physical expressions the feelings, 
attitudes, and acts of other persons ; but we do not contemplate the 
latter in themselves. You and I see the same chair from slightly 

1 On the relation of mind and body, see Book iv, Chap. 27. 

2 If I were the only self in my physical universe, there being no distinc- 
tion between mine and any other universe, I could only conclude, when my 
expectations were disappointed and my purposes had gone awry, that reality 
had changed its character, and not that I had misconceived that character. 
The world of illusions in which the insane person lives is due to the derange- 
ment of the social relations of the insane ego. The insane ego, because of 
his fixed ideas or obsessions, fails to apprehend the qualities and relations of 
things and persons that the normal ego apprehends. The genius, on the con- 
trary, is one who sees deeper and farther into the qualities and relations of 
social experience than does the average person. 

238 



PHYSICAL REALITY 239 

different angles, but we do not see at all one another's personal 
feelings and inner attitudes. In the case of universals, such as 
logical and mathematical relationships, natural laws, types of 
order, and values and ends when these are considered to be ob- 
jective realities, we have to do with entities which are common to 
the mental and the physical realms ; and this community implies 
that the mental and the physical realms are somehow organic to 
one another, that they are the twofold and interrelated aspects 
of one order. The validity or trueness of universals and values 
means that they are constitutive principles of reality as a whole. 
They are discovered and formulated gradually and imperfectly 
by finite minds; but the latter, in this process of discovery and 
formulation, are finding and obeying, and thus developing into 
harmony with, the objective constitution of reality. 

The nonmental conditions of sense data are brain and sense 
organs and qualitatively diverse energies operating in the public 
world of space time, such as : undulation of air particles, motions 
of physical particles, chemical transformations, molecular and 
intra-atomic or electronic energies, possible vibrations of the all- 
pervading ether, etc. Why not say that the latter are the primary 
and fundamental physical realities, whereas the sensory data are 
secondary or derivative? Does not Berkeleyan idealism rest on 
the confusion between sensory data and physical realities, between 
perceptions and stimuli ? Mr. Bertrand Russell proposes that we 
shall define physical realities as the not-perceived entities which 
obey the laws of physics and our sensory data as series of aspects 
or perspectives of these realities. 3 For example, the rim of my 
teacup has an indefinite series of shapes, from circular through 
a variety of shapes, according to the respective spatial relations 
of myself and the cup. What I mean by saying that the cup's 
rim is really circular is, that is the shape it has in the position 
which is practically most important for me, namely, within easy 
reach of my hands. Common sense means by real size, real shape 
or other real sense qualities, those sensory appearances which are 
most relevant to our most constant practical purposes. Logically 
the flattest oval or ellipsoid shape in which the cup's rim appears, 
as when we stand it on the edge of the rim, is just as real as the 
circular shape it has in my hands. The visual shape of a stick 

*Cf. B. Euasell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Chaps. 3 and 4. 



240 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

which is partly under water is really bent. But the tactual shape 
is straight and the visual stick when out of the water corresponds 
with the tactual shape in or out of the water, and this correspond- 
ence is for practical purposes the most important aspect of the 
whole indefinite series of aspects which the thing may present ; so 
we call it the real stick. There are mathematical and physical 
laws by which we sum up in formulse the relations between whole 
series of varying sense data such as the cup's series of shapes. 
Why not say then that the real physical object is the conceived 
entity that obeys these laws ? 

The question at issue here is chiefly a matter of terminology. 
In order to avoid the errors of subjectivism or mentalism it seems 
best to say that the sensory appearances are the primary realities; 
and that the reality of sense data, as due to the organic interde- 
pendence of the mind and physical things, involves the construc- 
tion, starting from sense perception, of a doctrine as to what kinds 
of entities logically must exist in nature independent of sense 
perception — in other words a realistic theory of nature. I pro- 
ceed to outline my own theory. 

When we undertake to account for one sense datum or a series 
of sense data, we have to assume an interacting system of things 
in motion which give rise to the sensory data — undulating par- 
ticles, molecular, atomic or intra-atomic centers of attraction and 
repulsion, etc. These we may call, to use Mr. C. D. Broad's happy 
phrase, the microscopic mechanisms. These microscopic or rather 
ultra-microscopic mechanisms are pulverized or comminuted 
macroscopic mechanisms. In other words, they are conceived by 
taking the most simple and manageable sense qualities ; extension, 
figure, motion, mass, and reducing them to ever minuter propor- 
tions. They remain objects of possible perception. If our powers 
of sensory discrimination were fine enough they might be per- 
ceived. With an ultra-microscope we might see electrons. Actual 
sensory things are complexes of sensed qualities existing in spatial 
relations. The shape and color of a rose, for instance, are spa- 
tially coterminous. The place of one thing excludes another in 
so far as the thing is real, that is, has inertia or mass. Thus 
space-occupancy and circulation or movement through space are 
the most fundamental characteristics of physical things, their 
most constant qualities. By "space-occupancy" I mean inertia or 
mass and this implies force. Thus the ultimate things of physics 



PHYSICAL REALITY 241 

are space-occupying centers of force or inertia, since force is the 
power to do work and work consists either in moving something 
against an obstacle or in resisting movement. A physical thing 
is a power to move against another, and a power to resist move- 
ment by another. This most stubborn quality of bodies is re- 
garded as its primary reality, but logically it is no more primary 
than figure, color, or "feel." The ultimate thing, so-called, of 
physics is thus a conceptual construct projected behind the sen- 
sory things and events in order to explain the changes in the latter. 
In short, the things and processes of physical theory — molecules, 
atoms, sub-atoms or electrons, undulation, rotation, etc. — are ab- 
stract entities denuded of those sensory qualities which do not 
lend themselves readily to mathematical treatment, and which 
cannot be made very small without seeming to disappear ; such as 
color, sound, taste, odor. The "things" of physics are constructed 
from those empirical qualities which have relatively greatest con- 
stancy, and therefore are most readily susceptible of being made 
into mechanical models and having their behaviors formulated in 
mathematical terms. The laws of physical relationship are eco- 
nomic or shorthand generalizations in regard to the most uniform, 
simple, and calculable aspects of sensory data — those aspects which 
can be most easily manipulated in mechanical models. As thus 
conceived and manipulated, they cannot really exist and they do 
not explain the qualitative variety of empirical objects. Since 
the percipient, and also the secondary qualities of the objects per- 
ceived, are not amenable to mathematical and mechanical treat- 
ment they are dropped from the reckoning. 

Thus the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, 
as being respectively objective and subjective, is invalid ; however 
convenient it may be for the physicist. It is convenient for his 
purposes, since the space-mass-time-motion aspects of sense data 
are those most easily manipulated in mechanical and mathematical 
terms; but colors, tastes, sounds, and odors are, experientially, 
just as real as shapes, movements and masses. All the sensory 
qualities are real, since they belong to a world which consists 
of sensory and mental systems and of other systems in organic 
interdependence. 

The attempt made in "energetic" philosophies of nature to 
reduce the physical world to a constellation of dimensionless punc- 
tiform centers of force or energy results in the absurdity of saying 



242 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

— "everything is motion, but there is nothing which moves or is 
moved," "all is change but there is nothing which changes." 4 

The more thoroughly physical facts, such as heat, electricity, 
sound, or light, are analyzed, the clearer it becomes that these 
sensory data are due to the interactions of qualitatively different 
entities — physical entities, sensory system, and mind. Nature 
must consist of things, that is, real entities, which move and act, 
impinge on and interpenetrate one another. Certainly the ulti- 
mate things must at least be centers of activity; they must be 
things which have locations, habitations, and which move in the 
space-time order. The conclusion that I draw is that nature 
consists of a vast system of centers of activity which I call 
individua or monads. There are at least three kinds of these 
monads — physical, sentient, and intelligent monads. On the basis 
of evidence in hand from their respective modes of behavior, I 
am unable to determine whether all vital monads are sentient, 
or whether a vital monad is nothing more than a special constella- 
tion of physical or chemical-physical monads; but I am not able 
to see how the distinctive behavior of vital monads — adaptation, 
growth, restitution of lost parts, vicarious functioning, reproduc- 
tion, and irritability — can be accounted for in purely physical 
and chemical terms. It seems to me probable then that nonliving 
and living monads are distinct kinds and possible that all vital 
monads are sentient. I think that there is an inherent difference 
of kind between merely sentient and rational or intelligent monads. 
Thus there are three distinct possible kinds of monads in nature. 
So far is the universe from being composed of elements all of the 
same kind and differing only quantitatively, that it consists of 
a vast multitude of several qualitatively different kinds of ele- 
ments interrelated. Nor is nature simply qualitatively dual in 

4 This error, from which Leibniz and Boscovich were not free, and of 
which there are traces in Ostwald and other energeticists, seems to me to be a 
feature of Bergson's philosophy of nature. I am unable to understand or to 
follow Bergson's genesis of nature and space from duration and psychical life 
conceived as nonspatial. Bergson both presupposes and generates matter from 
his elan vital. Intellect, he says, has been evolved by the vital impetus as an 
instrument by which it may successfully operate upon solid and inert matter 
and thus surmount the latter. On the other hand, intellect and matter have 
been evolved together; matter thus appears to be a product of the very in- 
strument which has been developed to circumvent it. Now, either the vital 
impetus must have generated matter, must have set up the obstacle as an 
aspect of its play with itself, as Fichte's ego set up the non-ego (Anstoss) ; 
or else materiality, which is spatiality, is not an internal product of the vital 
impetus, which is pure duration or becoming. 






PHYSICAL REALITY 243 

its constitution. It is at least triple, possibly quadruple or even 
multiple. There is a qualitative multiplicity as well as a quanti- 
tative multitude of elements in it. 

Nature, in the sense of the whole of reality, consists of a vast 
system of interrelated monads, in which there are differences ol 
kind, as well as indefinite gradations of degrees. Even the ulti- 
mate things of physics, whatever they be, cannot be all alike, 
though they may all consist of varying combinations of the same 
fundamental qualities. They must have a poor sort of individu- 
ality. Vital and sentient monads have still greater diversity in 
the combinations of their fundamental qualities. Individuality, 
in the sense of uniqueness and distinctness in the combination of 
fundamental qualities, increases as we pass from merely sentient 
to intelligent monads. 

A higher type of monad includes in its service lower types. 
Physical monads are, in living organisms, subservient to vital and 
sentient monads. Vitality and sentience in turn are subservient 
to personality. The human organism is a complex of physico- 
chemical and vital monads controlled by an intelligent monad. 
The various types of monads, although differing in kind, are 
capable of affecting one another. Organisms both affect and are 
affected by the qualities of inorganic monads; minds both affect 
and in turn are affected by inorganic or vital monads; but, as 
nature rises in the scale towards more complex individuality, in 
other words towards personality, they have fuller internal unity 
of activity and life. The relative power of the governing principle 
increases. Thus an intelligent human monad has much more 
power of control over the physical environment than the merely 
sentient and vital monad which constitutes the being of the lower 
animal. 

Nature as a whole consists in the organic interplay or inter- 
action and intercommunication between the various types of 
monads. Thus nature is a vastly diversified system of individua, 
with an indefinitely complex and dynamic order of interrelated- 
ness in action and passion among its members. It is a concrete 
and living totality. Nature truly owns the sensory qualities that 
we perceive and, doubtless, many that we do not perceive. It 
owns the aesthetic qualities. It owns all the wealth of form and 
color, of sound and movement, of taste, of beauty, grandeur, pic- 
turesque sublimity, terror, homely friendliness, vitality, and in- 



244 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

cessant productivity, which we find in it; and doubtless it owns 
a vastly greater wealth of living qualities and meanings, which 
we could find were we equipped with more and finer, and more 
synoptic organs of response. 

Man, with all his imperfections, is a living and creative agent, 
interpreter and contemplator, who shares, through all the aspects 
of his being, in the life of nature, through whose veins and in 
whose consciousness the life of nature moves and comes to aware- 
ness of itself. What nature might be like in the absence of human 
beings to perceive, to act, to enjoy her, we cannot know and we 
have no concern with such an unknown "X" ; any more than we 
can form any inkling of what selves would be like if there were 
no world of physical nature. Man, both as a private and unique 
center of feeling and action and as a social being, is an organic 
part of nature. The richest, the most harmonious and compre- 
hensive meanings of nature are those which are embodied in the 
richest, most harmonious and comprehensive psychical and spir- 
itual life of man. 

The relations between the percipient, his percepts, and the 
abstract world of the physicist I conceive to be as follows : 

The conditions of sense perception are — (1) the conscious 
subject; (2) the sensory system composed of end organs, sensory 
nerves and brain; and (3) physical things. The sensory system 
is the medium of communication between the subject and the 
physical thing. If any part of the sensory system is deranged 
the power of perception is deranged; if any part is destroyed 
the corresponding power of perception is destroyed. The sensory 
system functions as a mechanism of selective condensation or con- 
centration of certain aspects of the vastly complicated motions 
and qualitative changes in the ceaselessly mobile physical universe, 
which thus act as stimuli to the sensory-intellectual system. Thus 
the sensory nervous system is a centralizing or focalizing select- 
ive synthetic system, corresponding and instrumental to the cen- 
tralizing selective and synthetic unity of the mind. Since, in the 
moment of perception, the sense percept is identical with the 
object perceived and, indeed, is a perspective or aspect of the 
object, there must be a fundamental identity of structure and 
process between the sensory system and the processes of the physi- 
cal order. The organism must be a very complicated and 
delicately adjusted system of physical energies. The organ- 



PHYSICAL REALITY 245 

ism is a condensing and transforming machine, intermediary 
between the external world and the mind. Further evidence 
of this identity of type between the organism and extra- 
organic physical entities I find in the fact that the sensory 
system, when no longer in immediate contact with objects, is 
able to generate images of them. These images involve all 
parts of the sensory system and are nonmental, in the sense that 
the mind as cognitive does not produce them. A visual image 
involves the eye, the optic nerve, and the brain. The images are 
of the same general character as their extraorganic counterparts; 
only they are more fleeting, tenuous, and weaker, because of the 
much greater fineness, complication, and variety of functions de- 
manded of the sensory system than of any part of the physical 
world. Any physical object is a particularized bit of physical 
structure and process. The percipient's organism is called upon 
to be responsive to a vast variety of differences in the structures 
and movements of things. 

The sensory system need not radically distort the real natures 
of physical things. Normally, it condenses or epitomizes them. 
It focalizes them for action. Our sense percepts are series of 
aspects or views, selected from the multitude of specific aspects 
or qualities which things become, in the vastly complicated and 
changing relationships of the physical world. No percept is 
wholly false or illusory and none is wholly complete. The per- 
cipient, we may say, takes a compact succession or series of views 
or perspectives of the real things. Because of their similarities 
and of their importance for action, the differences between the 
successive views in such a series are practically negligible. There- 
fore they are consolidated into images which, fused with succeed- 
ing sense data, are taken to be the thing in its wholeness for 
purposes of behavior. My study chair may be perceived from an 
indefinite variety of points of view, but the practically most im- 
portant ones are the similar or fairly continuous points of view 
which I get as I approach it to sit in it and actually do sit in it. 
Therefore, I ignore all the other possible aspects of the chair and 
run these into one as being the real chair. 

I repeat that in perception the percept is identical with those 
partial aspects or perspectives of the real object that are signifi- 
cant for human behavior. Apart from the subject the world of 
physical objects is the realm of potential perceptions or sense 



246 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

perceivables. It owns, in posse, all the colors, shapes, sounds, 
tastes, temperatures, etc., that are perceived in it, and doubtless 
a great many qualities besides. If our sensory systems were dif- 
ferent, were more microscopic for example, we should doubtless 
find a corresponding wealth of sensory details in the world. 

The sense qualities, which constitute physical reality for us, 
are grouped as determinate individual things or unitary com- 
plexes. But all sense qualities are not equally individuated or 
particularized and localized. Some have preeminently the char- 
acter of continua, in which the particular things are bathed. Thus 
there are very significant differences in the relational or con- 
nexional functions of the sensory attributes. In place of the il- 
logical and untenable distinction between primary qualities, as 
objective, and secondary qualities as subjective, I propose a rela- 
tivistic distinction between the sense qualities in terms of their 
respective degrees of spatial diffusiveness, pervasiveness, or degree 
of localization. Certain sense qualities are apparently all-perva- 
sive or universally transmissible. They penetrate or encompass 
all particulars. The light that reveals a body and is reflected from 
it, absorbed by it, or that passes through it, the gravitational force 
that holds bodies together, the electrical undulations that pene- 
trate them, the lines and fields of force that irradiate from them 
— all these qualities constitute as a body's field of action and 
passion the whole universe. With reference to them the particular 
thing is but a nodal point or transient center of interference in 
the ceaselessly mobile continuum of the universe, a passing con- 
centration of intensity and velocity in the endless ebb and flow 
in a dynamic world. Other sense qualities, such as colors, odors, 
tastes, the "feel" of bodies, are more localized, specialized, static 
differentiations. The particular or individuum exists only as part 
of the total continuum of the physical universe ; but certain of its 
qualities are more fluent and extensive in their relations than 
others. All the sense qualities are real, but some embody less of 
the thing's particularity and more of its dependence in the dynamic 
whole, while others embody more of its particularity and less of 
its dependence. 

The physicist's world of atoms, electrons, etherial undulations, 
the ether continuum, and so forth, is a conceptual construction 
devised for his special purposes, which are to calculate and explain 
the general phenomena and interrelationships of space, time, 



PHYSICAL REALITY 247 

mass, motion, energy; and the more specific phenomena and 
interrelationships of heat, light, color, sound, electricity. It 
furthers these purposes of physics to construct conceptual mechan- 
ical and dynamical models that are simpler, finer, and more 
rigorous than sense data. The abstract world of the physicist is 
a product of the constructive imagination guided by logical postu- 
lates and controlled by reference to sense data. The difference 
between the poet's world of nature and the physicist's is that the 
former is not so closely controlled by sense data and is guided 
by the intuitive analogies of feeling rather than by logical postu- 
lates. The physicist's world has logical reality; it is valid, but it 
may or may not have existential reality. It may be that electrons 
and the ether actually exist. I do not know. At present they 
are hypothetical extensions and supplementations of empirical 
reality, justified by their logical uses. If they really exist they 
must have more qualities and a more determinate character than 
the physicist needs, for his abstract purposes, to endow them with. 
They cannot, if actual, have mere extension, figure, motion, mass. 
They must have potential color, sound, temperature, "feel." And 
they must be determinate things with some degree of individu- 
ality. If the electrons and the ether are experienced by some 
beings they are actual realities, not mere logical postulates. If 
they are capable of being perceived they are real. For in order 
that anything may be existentially real it must be actually per- 
ceived or capable of being perceived. It must be a sense per- 
ceivable. When you try to count out of the universe all actual 
and possible experience and all experients and ask what is left 
you can return no intelligible answer. 

As to what exists in the physical realm, behind and beyond 
actual experience, our answer must be that we do not know and 
can only guess. If we should ever become able to say that we 
know, which is quite possible, then the behind and beyond would 
have ceased to be behind and beyond and would have become parts 
of the system of experience. 5 

6 Since the above chapter was in substance written there has appeared 
a very important discussion of the relation between the world of sense and 
the world of physics in Bertrand Russell's Our Knowledge of the External 
World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. See lectures iii and iv. 
I have adopted from Mr. Eussell the happy phrase "series of aspects. " His 
discussions of time and space are also important. The perusal of Mr. Rus- 
sell's book has not led me to modify my views, but it has helped me to clarify 
them, I hope. 



248 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

APPENDIX 

PANPSYCHISM 

Panpsychism is a higher form of pan-biotism or hylozoism. The 
panpsychist holds not only that all nature is alive and, consequently, 
that the cleavage we make between the inorganic and the organic 
realms is simply due to our inability to recognize the vital processes 
in the inorganic realm ; but that the whole of nature is the operation 
of a vast system of interrelated centers of experience or of psychical 
monads, and that unconscious and nonpsychical matter does not really 
exist. In modern philosophy this doctrine is held, among others, 
by Bruno, Leibniz, Berkeley, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Fechner, Lotze, 
and Paulsen. More recently it has been advanced by Josiah Eoyce, 
C. A. Strong, J. M. E. McTaggart, Mary W. Calkins, James Ward, 
and L. W. Stern. 6 It is erroneously attributed to William James. 
Whether Bergson is a panpsychist I cannot quite make out. Miss 
Calkins advances the following arguments on its behalf: 

1. The only reality experienced by us is mental, and, since all 
reality is experienced, all reality must consist of experients. 

2. She points to the growth of the dynamic conception of nature 
from the self-activity of Fichte, the will of Schopenhauer, to con- 
temporary dynamic or energetic conceptions of nature, as supporting 
the doctrine. The value of this argument depends on whether one 
is constrained to admit that all force or energy is will force or will 
energy. Certainly present-day physicists do not appear to find them- 
selves constrained to admit that molecules, atoms or electrons are 
centers of volition. I find it easier to conceive that there are some 
centers of activity that are not even momentarily conscious, than to 
conceive that atoms or electrons feel, desire and strive. They attract 
and repel one another, it is true ; but it does not follow that they must 
love and hate and sorrow and rejoice. I do not understand why 
there should be such striking apparent differences in the behavior 
of persons and inanimate things, if things are but rudimentary 
persons. It is quite true that our laws of nature may all be only 
statistical averages, which leave out of account the indefinitely numer- 
ous individualities whose behavior they profess to generalize. But 
it does not follow that the- individuals are all of the same funda- 
mental type, namely persons or psychical monads. 



9 Eoyce, The World and the Individual, Vol. II. 

Ward, The Bedim of Ends. 

Stern, Person und Sache. 

Mary W. Calkins, Philosophical Review, Vol. 28, pp. 115-146. 



PHYSICAL REALITY 249 

In order to account for the fact that we do not recognize the 
persons or selves that constitute the so-called inanimate realm, Miss 
Calkins makes an ingenious classification of relations between selves. 
There are, she says, three kinds of relationships between selves: 1. 
Intercommunicating relationships which obtain between human 
persons. 2. Communicating relationships which obtain between 
human persons and animals. I communicate with my dog and he 
with me. He obeys my behests and I recognize his deep devotion, 
but he does not know what I feel, nor I what he feels. 3. Noncom- 
municating relationships obtain between human persons and the lower 
animals, plants and inorganic things. But is it not a simpler hy- 
pothesis to say that I cannot hold communication with a cabbage or 
a rock because there is no one there to communicate with? The 
theory that we cannot communicate with these lower persons because 
of the differences between our time spans or rates of conscious rhythm 
is ingenious, but I do communicate with the dog and the cat whose 
time spans must be different from mine, and I simply cannot com- 
municate with the cabbage or rock. Since I am unable to communi- 
cate with any other mind otherwise than through the medium of his 
body and my body, I do not see why I should assume; first, that 
both our bodies are made up of a lot of little minds and, second, 
that the physical bodies with which I can hold no psychical conver- 
sation are likewise made up of little minds. 

The argument that in knowledge subject and object are strictly 
correlative, and therefore knowledge is unintelligible unless in every 
instance the object be another subject, has little or no value. It 
depends on the homeopathic dogma that a mind can know only that 
which is of the same character as itself. Now, the panpsychist 
admits that we know other minds only through their physical ex- 
pressions. What point, then, is there in arguing, that I cannot know 
your mind unless your body be made up of inferior souls, through 
which my mind or superior soul has indirect intercourse with your 
mind? There is no logically significant difference between the prob- 
lem as to how my mind can transcend its own subjective states in 
knowing another object, whether we state that other object to be a 
mind in a body, or a mind ruling a lot of little minds, or a body that 
has no mind at all. The panpsychist assumes; first, that in order 
that in knowledge a mind may transcend itself the objects of its 
knowing must be mental; second, he must then argue further that 
the minds which we all believe we know something of, namely other 
human minds, are known through the intercourse of the knower's 
mind, not directly with the other minds which he knows, but in- 
directly, through the medium of bodies which appear to be very 



250 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

different from the minds which are known by means of them but 
which bodies must nevertheless be made up of inferior grades of 
minds. The whole argument is perverse, since it starts from an 
arbitrary assumption akin to the proposition that he who would drive 
fat oxen must himself be fat. 

In truth we know finite mind only through its contrast with the 
nonmental order. Mind and physical nature are complementary 
aspects of the actual world. Their true relation is one of organic 
interdependence in the totality of the real. Eeduce either term to 
complete identity with the other and both lose their distinctive 
meaning. The whole development of knowledge and practice, and, 
indeed, the entire evolution of selfhood, has involved this funda- 
mental contrast and relation of physical nature and mind. 

Panpsychism fails to account for the appearance of physical things 
with qualities empirically different from minds, and which yet serve 
as instruments for mind's self-expression. Certain specific physical 
expressions are taken to be signs of mind. Why should there be any 
signs required if panpsychism be true? Why should not bodiless 
minds know each other directly? 

Our knowledge of other minds is ejective. We eject a mind into 
physical complexes wherever there are intelligible signs of mind. 

Primitive man, we are told, ejected an anima or soul into every 
sort of physical object which arrested his attention. The progress 
of positive knowledge has been in the direction of limiting the scope 
of this ejective distribution of souls in nature. The differentiation 
and integration of experience through science has brought with it 
the narrower limitation of the ejective reference of minds to physical 
complexes that have close and weighty resemblance to our own bodies. 

What do we find in inorganic nature which bears a close analogy 
to the unity of a rational mind? Suppose that all bodies are made 
up of momentary centers of consciousness, how does the panpsychist 
explain the evolution of these into human personalities without as- 
suming the continuous unifying or synthetic activity of conscious- 
ness, which is rational mind? And, if he does assume this synthetic 
unity, what need is there of reducing physical nature to a system 
of inferior souls ? Of course it may be said that these low-grade souls 
do not evolve into true selves. They always remain different in kind. 
But then the argument for panpsychism from the principle of con- 
tinuity falls to the ground. There must in either case be novelty 
somewhere in the process, and the common sense view that physical 
things are not souls is the more consonant with the findings of ex- 
perience. Why not admit, as simpler and not less intelligible, that 
souls and nonpsychical existents may interact? 



PHYSICAL REALITY 251 

The argument that the laws of nature are like acquired habits 
of mental and bodily behavior seems to me to rest on a rather far- 
fetched analogy. The argument on behalf of panpsychism that the 
uniformities in physical nature represent very rough and inaccurate 
statistical averages which conceal the real complexity, individuality, 
and variability of the finite souls which constitute physical nature, 
just as our human vital statistics cover up the rich complexity, indi- 
viduality, and variability in the social world, is not convincing. Uni- 
formity and predictability will be much less easy to find where indi- 
viduality is complex and rich. Where there is readily calculable 
uniformity which can be applied in technical practices, does not that 
indicate the absence of psychical individuality? The fact that the 
laws of human behavior are more difficult to discover and formulate 
and so much less exact than the laws of the behavior of physical 
things seems pretty clearly to indicate that the latter are not im- 
mediate manifestations of finite centers of consciousness. This does 
not mean that there is no uniformity in human nature, but that it 
is uniformity of a different order than the physical. Intermediate 
between the two is biological uniformity. 

In whatsoever manner psychical individuals may be distributed 
outside human ken, nature's controlling meaning is the development 
of psychical individuality. Matter is a positive factor in the cosmical 
process of organization or personalization. "Inorganic nature/' re- 
garded as existing independent of perceptual experience, is the ab- 
stract conceptual reality of a common world structure, which is taken 
to be the permanent and universal condition of perception. This 
conceptual reality is reached by elimination of the specific reactions 
of percipient organisms. For example, the luminiferous ether is the 
remainder of spatial motion required to account for perceptions of 
light and color when the specific reactions of the percipient have been 
deducted from the total phenomenon. Correlate these deductions 
with others derived from electric and magnetic phenomena and one 
gets the electro-magnetic theory of light. But these concepts are 
derivative, not primary realities. The latter are found in the realm 
of immediate experience. Our psychophysical organisms are non- 
eliminable elements in the totality of nature. The nonperceptual 
physical entity called in to explain perception has only a reality of 
the second order, that of logical relation to the primary reality. The 
general structures and forces of nature, the "matter," "space," 
"motion" and "body" of common sense, the "mass," "energy," "ether," 
"atom," "electron," etc., of science are symbols of certain universally 
experienced and persistent features of perception, which are describ- 
able and calculable in fairly simple and precise formulas. The total 



252 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

reality must be a system or society of interacting and interpatient 
beings, together with the general conditions of their social and indi- 
vidual lives. The unity of the whole is that of a teleological meaning 
whose character is most adequately expressed in personality. 

Our next step will be an inquiry into the meaning of life, its 
evolution and its relation to mind. 



CHAPTEE XX 

LIFE AND MECHANISM 

Life may be described provisionally as the totality of the 
peculiar properties manifested by organized matter. They are, 
specifically, the following: (1) irritability, the specific kind of 
responsiveness to stimuli manifested by living beings; in the 
higher animals, at least, and possibly in all organisms, irritability 
is accompanied by sensitivity; (2) tropism, the impulse to turn 
towards or away from certain stimuli; this may be called reflex 
action, and instincts are complex reflexes: (3) the power of self- 
reparation; (4) the power of adaptation or self-adjustment and 
self-development ; (5) the power of self-reproduction with varia- 
tion; (6) the higher organisms have the additional power of 
memory and of choice among the memory elements reproduced 
from past experience ; thus the higher organisms manifest intelli- 
gence and will. In short, in the case of man, at least, a living 
organism seems to be able to free itself from the blind routine of 
mechanical responses to external or innate internal stimuli through 
the modification of reflex responses by internal stimuli engendered 
by memory and intelligent reflection thereon. Summing up the 
characteristics of a living organism in its most developed form, 
we may say that an organism is a dynamic unity which adapts 
itself to its environment, develops, maintains, repairs and repro- 
duces itself ; exhibiting in these processes the powers of sentience, 
memory, selection and rearrangement of the elements of its experi- 
ence for better adaptation of itself to the environment and of the 
environment to itself, and conscious choice in the sense of the 
variation of its innate powers of response to satisfy ends or desires 
formed by the activity of the intelligence from the matter of 
experience. 1 

1 Professor J. S. Haldane argues persuasively from the physiological ac- 
tivities of the organism in maintaining normals; such as alveolar carbon 
dioxide pressure, the regulation of the hydrogen ion concentration and the 
balance of nutritive substances, that the normals of living organisms are the 
expression of what the organism is and that life itself is a unique reality. 
See his article "The New Physiology," Science, N. S., Vol. xliv, pp. 621-631. 

253 



254 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

Is there a supermechanical life principle operative in organ- 
ized matter ; or are the properties of the living organism, as above 
enumerated, nothing but effects of more complicated physico- 
chemical mechanisms of the same order as those manifest in the 
realm of nonliving matter? The vitalist maintains, "that me- 
chanical formulae do not begin to answer the distinctively biolog- 
ical questions. . . . We need new concepts, such as that of the 
organism as an historic being, a genuine agent, a concrete indi- 
viduality, which has traded with time and has enregistered within 
itself past experiences and experiments, and which has its conative 
bow ever bent towards the future. We need new concepts, because 
there are new facts to describe, which we cannot analyze away into 
simpler processes. ... To the biologist the actualities are organ- 
isms and their doings, and life is a generalized concept denoting 
their peculiar quality." 2 In short, for the vitalist, while life is 
resident and operative in matter, life is not mere matter. Life 
is a principle which exerts a directive and selective control over 
physical energy. The universal tendency of the physical process 
to the degradation of energy is resisted by living beings which are 
able, within quite narrow limits, of course, to transform and 
direct physical energy in their own interests. Thus the individual 
organism is more than the physical or chemical sum of its parts. 
"Life is not a factorial element in any mechanical calculation of 
the work done by a living organism, since life is the managing 
director of the work." 3 

Vitalism, in the general sense of belief in the uniqueness of 
life, does not, properly speaking, mean that the living organism 
is in part a pure mechanism ; and that, in addition to its mechan- 
ically working parts, there is a nonperceptual and indeterminable 
agency at work (an entelechy or psychoid, in Driesch's terms) 
which occasionally interferes with the operation of the machine. 
A biologist surely can have no use for such a notion. He is a 
scientist, and all science presupposes that there is an unequivocal 
or determinate sequence in the events with which it deals, in other 
words that definite antecedent conditions have definite consequents. 
If, as Jennings says, 4 Driesch's vitalism means that "two systems 

2 J. Arthur Thomson, Article ' ' Life and Death, ' ' Encyclopedia of Re- 
ligion and Ethics, Vol. VIII, 

"J. G. Simpson, "Art. Biology, " Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. 

4 Jennings, H. S., "Heredity and Personality, ' ' in Science, 1911 and 
Science, 1912. 



LIFE AND MECHANISM 255 

absolutely identical in every physicochemical respect may behave 
differently under absolutely identical conditions" the conception 
is unscientific. The scientific biologist is concerned to determine 
one-one correspondences between physicochemical conditions and 
the phenomena of life. The scientist seeks to determine the 
"particular go" or "how" of events, and to make his determinations 
as exact as possible; but, if there are specific differences between 
those types of behavior associated with physicochemical mechan- 
isms which are called organic types, and those types of mechanical 
behavior that have no accompanying organic phenomena, surely 
it is not the province of genuine science to assert dogmatically 
that there is nothing in the former complexes which differ in 
principle from the latter. A philosophical vitalist can admit that 
the life principle is a determinate power which works in specific 
fashions, but he contends that it differs uniquely from a non-living 
machine, and he makes this contention on good empirical grounds. 
He contends that the organism, as a whole, is a machine inhabited 
and directed by a principle having just those powers that are 
manifested in the phenomena of life, sentience, intelligence and 
will. Whether all these phenomena are manifested by all organ- 
isms is a question to be settled by empirical evidence. 

What does the mechanist mean by saying that every organism 
is a machine ? If he means only that every vital process involves 
a specific physicochemical process which is in one-one corre- 
spondence with it. I do not see why there should be any quarrel 
between the mechanist and the vitalist. If he means that there 
are no real differences between organic and inorganic processes, 
except differences in the complexity of the spatial configurations 
of their elements, that is an assumption which not only is far, as 
yet, from being proved but does not seem to do justice to the 
phenomena of life. As J. Arthur Thomson puts it, "an adequate 
idea of life requires a synthesis, and that again is impossible with- 
out sympathy. We must use our every-day experience of living- 
ness ... to enliven the larger data of biology . . . We must seek 
to envisage the variety of life — hundreds of thousands of distinct 
individualities or species; the abundance of life — like a river 
always tending to overflow its banks ; the diffusion of life — explor- 
ing and exploiting every corner of land and sea ; the insurgence of 
life— self-assertive, persistent, defiant, continually achieving the 
apparently impossible; the cyclical development of life — ever 



256 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

passing from death, through love, to death ; the intricacy of life — 
every cell a microcosm; the subtlety of life — every drop of blood 
an index of idiosyncracies ; the interrelatedness of life — with 
myriad threads woven into a patterned web ; the drama of life — 
plot within plot, age after age, with every conceivable illustration 
of the twin motives of hunger and love; the flux of life — even 
under our short-lived eyes; the progress of life — slowly creeping 
upward through unthinkable time, expressing itself in ever nobler 
forms; the beauty of life — every finished organism an artistic 
harmony; the morality of life — -spending itself to the death for 
other than individual ends; the mentality of life — sometimes 
quietly dreaming, sometimes sleep walking, sometimes wide- 
awake; and the victory of life — subduing material things to its 
will, and in its highest reaches controlling itself towards an in- 
creasing purpose." 5 

In brief, then, the vitalist argues: (1) that the daily function 
of living bodies by which they maintain through delicate internal 
adjustments the normals or equilibria necessary to life cannot be 
accounted for in mechanical terms alone; (2) that the patent facts 
of organic plasticity manifested in the organism's adaptiveness 
and selectiveness are supermechanical ; (3) that the development 
of the individual organism cannot be explained as due merely to 
a specialized configuration of nonliving physical elements; (4) 
that the evolution of organisms, with its wonderful variability, 
adaptiveness, coordination and correlation of parts and organs 
and modifications of the environmental conditions, is still less 
accountable on merely mechanical terms. 

What is a machine? In the simplest terms a machine is a 
humanly devised contrivance for achieving an end. Thus, we 
speak of physical machines, of vital machines, such as the 
mechanism of digestion or speech or walking, of political and 
social and even of literary machinery. In this broad sense any 
system of interdependent parts, which when put in operation pro- 
duces definite results, is a machine. In this loose sense of the 
term there is no incompatability between mechanism and guidance 
or direction. In mechanics a machine is an instrument by means 
of which we may change the direction and velocity of a given 



5 "Life and Death" (Biological) Hastings' Encyclopedia of Beligion 
and Ethics, Vol. VIII. 



LIFE AND MECHANISM 257 

motion. 6 In this special sense a machine is a human contrivance, 
depending for its operation upon the utilization of the inanimate 
and therefore blindly working forces or motions which exist in 
nature independent of the human will. The mechanical concep- 
tion of nature, taken on all fours, means that all the operations 
of nature result from the blind and inevitable alterations in the 
spatial configuration of mass particles. (Since the mass particles 
are ever in motion, all natural changes consist in the alteration of 
the distribution of the mass particles. ) Given a specific distribu- 
tion of mass particles, whatever follows therefrom is simply the 
blind resultant of the antecedent distribution of moving particles. 
The ultimate elements involved are changeless, the laws of motion 
are invariant and a quantitative equivalence runs through all the 
transformations. The latter conception is expressed in the prin- 
ciple of the conservation of energy, energy being regarded as the 
ground of motion. Nature, then, is an unimaginably vast and 
intricate system of mass units in motion. The entire system at 
any moment Y is the necessary mathematical or mechanical 
equivalent of the system at the next preceding moment X. All 
changes in the system of nature are simply blind and compen- 
satory motions in the whole spatial configuration of mass units 
which repel and attract one another. The ultimate explanation of 
any change is a problem in kinematics, the geometry of motion. 
At the present time the prevailing tendency of physics is to find 
the ultimates in negatively and positively charged electrical units 
— electrons. Mass or inertia is a function of electric repulsion, 
and velocity and figure of motion are functions of electrical repul- 
sion and attraction. Matter, in all its qualities, as these appear 
to our crude senses, is the resultant of the interrelations between 
the spatial configurations which we call physical bodies and the 
spatial configurations which we call living bodies. The perceptual 
qualities which are the bodies of common sense are the expressions 
of the microscopic mechanisms of the percipient organisms and 
external bodies in their microscopic intermotions. Images, con- 
cepts, feelings and appreciations are the echoes of the microscopic 
motions set up within the brain by the impact of microscopic 
motions external to the brain. The motions within the brain thus 
impelled die down slowly. Hobbes said, "Thought is decaying 

• Century Dictionary. 



258 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

sense" ; and, we may add, sense is the intermingling of microscopic 
impacts and rebounds of mass units at the periphery of the organ- 
ism. What the thing is that moves or whether, indeed, there be 
a thing that moves, deponent saith not. An electron is a center of 
electric charge and is in motion — but what is it that is in motion? 
Can a microscopic motion hit another microscopic motion without 
there being anything to hit or to be hit ? 

The up-to-date form of the mechanistic conception of nature 
is a very tenuous and elusive form of materialism. Nothing exists 
but matter and nothing happens but blindly pushed and pulled 
nonmatter in motion. Matter is force, but force or energy is 
motion. An immovable obstacle is a very stable system of micro- 
scopic motions — of what? Answer — of motions. An organism, 
whether it be a plant, an oyster or a man, is a fairly stable system 
of mechanical motions. Its colloidal constituents consist of chem- 
ical elements, and these in turn are systems of electrons, and an 
electron is a geometrical moving point — an event particle, as Mr. 
A. N. Whitehead calls it, or a point instant, as Mr. Samuel 
Alexander calls it. But where is a point and when is an instant ? 
A point never seems to be where it is, nor an instant when it is. 
The latest form of materialism or mechanism seems to dissolve 
the solid world of common sense into a movie film that moves so 
rapidly that the distraught spectator can make out no figures in 
it. It seems like a rapidly dissolving phantasmagoria of compli- 
cated nothings. Like Bergson's real duration it is a present which 
is not a present, but is the invisible progress of the past gnawing 
into the future (whatever that may mean), and, as it moves with 
incredible swiftness, it casts a shadow called space in which we 
poor mortals try to stave off vertigo by vainly imagining that we 
are somewhat permanent and fairly solid centers of activity in 
interaction and interpassion with other centers of activity. 

I am an empiricist, and I maintain that, certainly, in the case 
of human organisms, and, presumptively, in the case of other 
organisms, the living organism is a self-developing, self-adjusting, 
self-regulating, self -regenerating, self-reproducing principle which 
dwells and operates in a physicochemical machine. The organic 
machine is a super-machine, since it is the dwelling place of a 
living being. The biotic and psychic whole is greater than the 
physical or chemical sum of its parts. It is a living individual 
and its microscopic mechanisms are not the same when they 



LIFE AND MECHANISM 259 

function as parts of the living individual and when they cease 
to do so. Nonliving elements are functionally organic to living 
beings. Their synthesis in an organism involves the emergence 
into patent activity of a vital principle which must have been 
latent antecedent to the specific synthesis which manifests the 
distinctively vital phenomena. Life is what it does, life is its own 
ways of behavior. A living being is the unitary subject, of which 
the specific predicates are just the various features of livingness. 
Obviously, an organism is the ephemeral product of the forces of 
a universe that is sublime and terrible, sublime in its super- 
abundant creativeness, terrible to the single organism which it 
makes and destroys with such magnificent prodigality. Life does 
not arise from the lifeless, since there is no lifeless universe. 
Life appears in a vast variety and innumerable succession of indi- 
vidual forms, since the most salient character of the universe is 
just that it ceaselessly gives birth to living individuals. Life is no 
whit robbed of its meaning and place in reality by the admission 
that there is a one-one correspondence between every specific vital 
phenomenon and a specific physicochemical process. There are 
in the universe of realities nonliving elements, but every such 
element may be organic or functional to organisms, for the most 
concrete and specific character of reality as a whole is just that it 
endlessly gives rise to living individuals. The living and the non- 
living do not exist apart from one another. 

Logically the metaphysical problem of vitalism versus material- 
ism or mechanism is simply the most striking form of the more 
general problem — whether reality as a whole is most adequately 
interpreted in terms of the poorest and most abstract features of 
experience, whether in order to understand reality as a whole we 
are to rub out all diversity, concreteness, individuality, qualitative 
discontinuity and novelty or creativeness; or whether we are to 
say that the full meaning of reality can only be garnered by taking 
account of the fact that empirically it ever gives rise to a multitude 
of multiform individualities, concrete and creative. The mechan- 
ical aspect of reality is real, but it is abstract. Living organisms, 
in their graduated ascent, are increasingly adequate revelations of 
the secret of reality. Livingness is the most significant character- 
istic of reality, to which nonlivingness is subservient or instru- 
mental. Livingness, in turn, is the basis for the development of 
conscious mind. Conscious livingness realizes its fuller selfhood 



260 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

in the achievement of personality. The organism is the basis of 
mind, and mind is the organism capable of becoming at once for 
itself and for the universe — enjoying its own growth through the 
conscious enjoyment of the universe. 

Before we are in a position to appreciate the full meaning of 
personality it will be necessary for us to consider more in detail 
the relations of life, mind, and evolution. This we shall do in the 
next chapter. 



CHAPTEE XXI 

EVOLUTION, LIFE AND MIND 

I. The Factors of Organic Evolution 

In its simplest and most general form the doctrine of evolution 
means that the higher, in the sense of the more complex, organic 
forms have ascended from the lower, in the sense of the simpler, 
organic forms; and that this ascent has been the result of the 
modification of the simpler forms through natural causes. By 
"natural causes" is meant causes of the same order as the causes 
that are now observed to operate in the origins and life histories 
of organisms. If all the qualities and modes of behavior of organ- 
isms at present existing, and therefore under observation, can be 
accounted for in mechanical terms, it follows that the entire evolu- 
tionary ascent of life as well as its primal origin can be accounted 
for in mechanical terms. If there are difficulties in the way of the 
complete explanation of life as it at present exists, these difficulties 
will, of course, be greatly increased, when one surveys the whole 
panorama of organic evolution. On the other hand, if there are 
no serious difficulties in the way of giving a mechanical explana- 
tion of the behavior of existing organisms, the same principles of 
explanation will apply to the origin and evolution of life. In 
short, the problem of evolution can only be solved by the applica- 
tion, to the history of life, of principles derived from an analysis 
of empirical livingness. 

Evolution may be described in general terms, as Herbert 
Spencer describes it, as the change from simple to complex forms 
of existence characterized by concomitant processes of differentia- 
tion and integration; more briefly, organic evolution means 
increasing individuation, or the movement towards fuller selfhood. 
W. K. Clifford described it neatly as the tendency of the cosmic 
process to personify itself. Increase of individuation or selfhood 
involves increased power of association. The richest or most com- 
plex individualities, human persons, are capable of and do form 

261 



262 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the most varied and extensive social organizations. Therefore we 
are justified in saying, on empirical grounds, that a society of 
rational and free persons is the highest stage of evolution that we 
can conceive. To say that the infusoria or the oyster might regard 
the movement of life from themselves onward as a retrogression is 
just to utter a smart quibble, for it is a fact that a human society 
of the type just indicated is the most dominant form of living 
organization. It is a foolish objection to raise to the interpreta- 
tion of evolution as the progression of life towards the highest 
conceivable type of humanity, to say that it is a conceited 
anthropomorphism. For science, as well as philosophy, can never 
be anything else than an interpretation of human experience by the 
instrumentality of human thinking. And the first and last aim of 
philosophy is to interpret human experience in its totality, and to 
interpret the universe in terms of the totality of human experience. 
Let us assume, then, that life first appeared on the earth, 
possibly in quite simple forms, as the immediate accompaniment 
of a specific chemical complex ; since life, as we know it, manifests 
itself only in association with specific chemical configurations. 
Whether the simplest organisms are sentient it is impossible to say. 
Perhaps sentience is coextensive with organic responsiveness. 
Micro-organisms do manifest powers of discrimination and do 
use the trial and error methods which, at higher levels of organiza- 
tion, are regarded as indubitable signs of intelligence. Professor 
H. S. Jennings says, after a most exhaustive examination of the 
behavior of certain lower organisms, "So far as objective evidence 
goes there is no difference in kind, but a complete continuity 
between the behavior of lower and higher organisms" ; * "objective 
investigation is as favorable to the view of the general distribution 
of consciousness throughout animals as it could well be." 2 "It is," 
says J. Arthur Thomson, "impossible to think of intelligently 
controlled behavior evolving from behavior in which mentality was 
wholly absent, and it seems clearest to think of all organisms as 
psychophysical individualities." 3 Increase in variety, range and 
discriminativeness of sensitivity, and the appearance of memory 
with its power of enabling the organisms to profit from experience, 

1 Jennings, Behavior of the Lower Organisms, p. 335. 

8 Ibid., p. 337. 

* Thomson, The System of Animate Nature, Vol. I, Lecture vi, p. 219. The 
whole lecture is very interesting. Indeed the entire work is a valuable com- 
prehensive treatment of the philosophy of biology, to be cordially recommended. 



EVOLUTION, LIFE AND MIND 263 

its power of conscious enregistration, as J. Arthur Thomson so 
well puts it, are correlated with the appearance, and increase in 
complexity and relative bulk, of the nervous system. It cannot 
well be gainsaid that intelligence and memory are, in those animal 
forms which most indubitably manifest them, in some sense func- 
tions of the nervous system. The big-brained animals are those 
that manifest the highest intelligence. In man, the most intelli- 
gent biological being, the cerebral cortex contains some 9000 
millions of cells. Anatomically his brain is as far in advance of 
the brain of a chimpanzee as psychologically his mentality is in 
advance of the mentality of a chimpanzee. 

But this argumentation «uts two ways. If the growth in men- 
tality is correlated with the growth in the nervous system, can 
there be any mentality where there is no nervous system ? How 
can paramoecium and stentor (two animalculse studied by Jen- 
nings) have sentience if they have no nerve substance ? Perhaps 
they are all nerves, as they are all stomachs, hands and feet. But 
they have no differentiated nerve-tissues. If the lowest animals 
have sentience why not plants? Was Wordsworth right in his 
belief that "every flower enjoys the air it breathes" ? At most the 
consciousness of the lowest organisms would be like that of the 
body-monad of Leibniz — mens momentanea, seu carens recorder 
tione — momentary and disconnected flashes of sentience. But it is 
quite as hard to see how this momentary sentience can be contin- 
uous with human reason and be the lineal ancestor thereof, as it 
is to see how from a merely physicochemical aggregate sentience 
could emerge as a result of "complication," to use the terms 
employed by Dr. S. Alexander. The evolutionist works under the 
domination of the principle of continuity and seeks to close all the 
gaps in the scale of livingness. A saltation, a gap, a breach of 
continuity, is stench to his nostrils. Nevertheless, unless he is a 
sheer dogmatic materialist, he must admit saltations, discontinu- 
ities. If evolution be not a creative process in which novelties 
emerge, it is meaningless. Is there not as great a breach of con- 
tinuity between the mind of an Aristotle, a Shakespeare, or a 
Goethe on the one hand, and the mind of an orang-outang on the 
other hand, as there is between the mind of the orang-outang and 
the mind of a stentor? Is there not a striking discontinuity 
between the Javan or Sumatran jungle and the civilization of 
London or New York, a difference due to the difference in the 



264 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

minds which inhabit them ? It is one proposition to admit there 
are minds or feelings of some sort wherever there are the sorts of 
behavior which seem to imply feeling; quite another proposition 
to maintain that the mind of the white man has been evolved from 
a mind of the same order as the mind of a stentor. Does it follow 
that because we have vegetative needs therefore our minds are 
descended from the minds of plants ? If there be real distinction 
between organized and unorganized matter, why boggle at admit- 
ting a distinction between sentient and insentient, rational and 
nonrational organisms ? Either one should go the whole way and 
assume that all matter is besouled, and that the besouling only 
differs in degree of complication as the configuration of matter 
differs in like manner (universal hylozoism or hylopsychism a la 
Haeckel) ; or one should face the logical music and admit frankly 
that the attempt to make a fetish of the principle of continuity 
and explain the highest mentality as a descent or ascent from the 
lowest mentality, and this again from a mentality that is not men- 
tality but only the "potency" thereof, is a quibble. When we 
survey the panorama of organized matter or livingness we find 
structural and functional gaps. When we survey the panorama of 
behavior, as implying consciousness and intelligence, we find even 
greater gaps. The mental differences between two human beings 
are much greater than the observable anatomical differences; the 
mental differences between an intelligent civilized human being 
and a monkey seem to me even greater than the anatomical dif- 
ferences. 

Why not admit that "mind," as we know it in ourselves, is a 
creative infusion in the organic series ; that, while human minds 
are descended from other human minds by psychogenesis, human 
mind cannot be accounted for as the descendant of infrahuman 
mind? Mind is the biggest kind of saltation or "mutation" in 
the evolutionary series. It is the most striking instance of a 
creative novelty in the history of life. But the story of life is 
crowded with such novelties. It seems to me to follow that the 
story of evolution is only the spreading out, over an indefinitely 
long past, of the creative process, which in childlike fashion our 
spiritual ancestors supposed to have taken place in six solar days ; 
and that the entire story is the endless creative expression of a 
" transcendent life which is the source and ground and goal of the 
whole process. 



EVOLUTION, LIFE AND MIND 265 

Sentiency is the beginning of consciousness. Evolutionists 
who have recognized the impossibility of accounting for conscious- 
ness, as a by-product of merely physical agencies, have assumed 
that sentiency is a primary factor in evolution. Such is the view, 
in one form or another, of E. D. Cope, C. S. Minot, Wilhelm { 
Wundt, Josiah Koyce, H. Bergson, and James Ward. Mr. Cope, 
for example, held that matter, force and consciousness were the 
primary factors in evolution ; that all reflexes, and in general, all 
unconscious physiological activities, are of the same order as 
habits, which, originally acquired with conscious effort, become 
unconscious as they become automatic. The inorganic realm he 
conceived as the field of habit-automatisms acquired long ago. 
Quite similar is Wundt's view, except that Wundt interprets 
"force," which Cope makes a primary factor in evolution, in terms 
of striving or rudimentary volition. Quite similar in this respect 
to Wundt's view, is Bergson's doctrine of the vital impetus, which 
in turn is akin to the doctrine of LaMarck. This general doctrine 
can be traced back through the monads of Leibniz to the en- 
telechies of Aristotle. The logical motive for such speculations is 
the principle of continuity. If life be a primary factor, whereas 
sentience and the higher forms of consciousness have subsequently 
come into being as a result of more complex organization of life, 
then one has to admit discontinuity or saltation in the evolution 
process. Now the supervention, upon simple sentience, of con- 
scious memory, generalization from past experience and expecta- 
tion of the future; the supervention, upon these qualities, of 
reflective analysis and synthesis and of self -consciousness ; the 
appearance and development of rationality and sociality, the be- 
ginnings and growth of moral systems, of science and religion and 
art ; in short the origin and development of the higher intelligence, 
social order, and human culture — all these are cases of empirical 
discontinuity,, of novelties or creative syntheses, in the evolution 
process. Certainly, the appearance of social order and culture are 
no less striking and significant emergences of qualitative novelties 
in the evolution process than the appearance of life or simple 
sentience. Either we must admit a transcendent power of creative < 
synthesis, which functions intermittently in the history of life; 
or we must say that the novelties which appear at successive 
critical points in the evolution process and which constitute nodes 
in the growth of life have been always present potentially or 



266 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

latently in the life process. But, since it cannot be denied that 
significant novelties have appeared, both in the history of man and 
in the prehuman history of life, it seems to me that the above two 
alternatives really amount to the same thing. To deny that quali- 
tatively novel powers and achievements have appeared in the life 
process is to deny the facts and, by implication, to assert that all 
history, all temporal process, is illusion. History means not the 
eternal recurrence of the same, but a constant succession of differ- 
ences. "To make history" is to initiate real novelties. The words 
*- of the world-weary skeptic, "There is nothing new under the 
sun," are false. To admit significant novelties in, the cosmic life 
process is to admit a power of creative synthesis. The purport of 
the admission for an interpretation of the universe would be the 
same, whether one held that this creative principle was immanent 
in the simplest forms of life or that it entered organisms and began 
to function in them at specific stages in their evolution, as a super- 
venient principle granted to the organic individual by the uni- 
versal order and entering organisms from a transcendent spring of 
creativeness. The principle of continuity would seem to be most 
fully satisfied, on naturalistic premises, if one could conceive the 
creative principle as fully and adequately immanent in a world of 
atoms or of infusoria. This I am unable to do, since then the 
world of atoms or infusoria would not be what it appears to be ; 
it would be the infinite source and ground of the whole created 
order. It would have become what the philosophical religionist 
means by "God." 

II. The Mechanistic Doctrine of Evolution 

Mechanistic metaphysics is materialism. A purely mech- 
anistic doctrine of evolution means, briefly, that all the so-called 
creative novelties, richer individualities and forms of association 
that have emerged in the evolutionary process are nothing but the 
blind resultants of the blindly shifting, spatial configurations of 
mass particles. 

According to the latest form of the atomic theory of matter, 
mass-particles are moving points which attract and repel one 
another because of their electric charges. If two particles attract 
one another it is because they have complementary, that is, positive 
and negative, charges. If they repel one another they must have 



EVOLUTION, LIFE AND MIND 267 

the same kinds of charges. The mass and the inertia, which is but 
another name for the resistance of a body to motion by the impact 
of another body, of a particle or a system of particles are functions 
of their electric charge. Thus the electronic theory of matter 
reduces all other qualitative diversities in the physical world to 
differences in the geometrical patterns of motions due solely to the 
attractions and repulsions of electrically charged points. Thus 
matter, in the ordinary sense of extended, and therefore divisible, 
bodies, is reduced to moving configurations of indivisible points. 
It is not unfair to say that, on this view, what common sense 
regards as matter consists of nonmatter in motion. The mechan- 
istic doctrine of evolution would account for all the qualitative 
diversities and novelties of the evolution process, from planetes- 
imals to man, as being the blind products of the incessant shifting 
in the configurations of electrified points. The laws of evolution 
are thus special cases of the laws of physical motion. The prob- 
lem of evolution is a vast series of problems in the geometry of 
motion. 

I regard this mechanical doctrine of evolution as inadequate on 
the following grounds : 

1. The geometry of motion does not explain how one set of 
empirical physical qualities arises, and is transformed into another 
set of different qualities. The redistribution of electronic points 
may be a necessary condition of the existence of empirical quali- 
ties. I do not know, since I do not know whether matter, as it 
exists apart from the percipient organism, consists solely of elec- 
trified points in motion. If it does so consist the points must 
occupy space and move in it ; and therefore empty space must be 
an objective reality. If there is no empty space then there can be 
no ultimately indivisible elements of matter ; but I can form no 
consistent conception of an absolutely empty space. If all space 
be filled with force; if, in other words, space be the whole field 
of energy; then the ultimate physical reality must consist of con- 
centration points or nodes of energy and their dynamic interrela- 
tions. Then the ultimate physical reality is a system of inter- 
related energy centers. 

Let us return to the question of the inadequacy of an abstract 
kinematical explanation of empirical qualities. For example: the 
motions of the electrons which make up the neuro-muscular system 
of a violinist produce alterations in the arrangements of the elec- 



268 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

trons which make up his violin; these alterations produce altera- 
tions in the motions of the electrons which make up my sensory 
and central nervous system. I see a violinist playing; I hear a 
system of sounds; and I feel emotions; I feel sweet or sad or 
stirring "music of humanity"; there are aroused in me compas- 
sionate, noble, or stirring thoughts ; perhaps the music sets me off 
in a train of speculation. The mechanical theory has explained 
the varied and significant empirical qualities of the musical event 
and its consequences, by explaining them out of existence. But 
the concrete reality is the totality of empirical qualities. Mechan- 
ism alone does not account for the actual realm of experience. The 
latter is a varied and rich totality of living qualities with their 
meanings. It includes the so-called primary and secondary phys- 
ical qualities, inextricably interfused with aesthetic and other 
affectional qualities and with meanings. A world denuded of all 
empirical qualities is not only not the actual world, it is not even 
an intelligible explanation of the latter. A percipient and active 
organism is a real factor in the constitution of actual nature ; but 
a percipient and active organism is a living, feeling, thinking 
being. If percipients be illusory epiphenomena, then the world 
of pure mechanics is an even more ghostly and unaccountable illu- 
sion, since this world is the offspring of the thought of beings who 
perceive and think. In order to account for the world as it is, 
and to account for its becoming what it is, we must presuppose 
living, feeling, thinking beings; in short we must presuppose 
psychophysical organisms. 

2. If the mechanical theory were an adequate account of 
nature, then the processes of the latter should be in general re- 
versible. But these processes are irreversible. The second law of 
thermodynamics is a generalized statement of the irreversibility of 
the physical order. By the exercise of human ingenuity the down- 
ward course of physical events is in some degree altered. The 
universal process of the degradation of energy is temporarily 
arrested. But even this apparent exception is no real exception 
to the principle that the entropy of a physical system tends towards 
a maximum ; that is, that energy is always passing from available 
to unavailable forms. The qualitative changes in nature, includ- 
ing all the novelties which arise in the evolutionary process and 
all the achievements of human art, seem to be conditioned by this 
principle. The energy of the sun's heat is transformed into chem- 



EVOLUTION, LIFE AND MIND 269 

ical energies of plants. Through metabolism and combustion these 
make food and fuel, and thus give rise to vital energy in animals 
and to industrial energy. Man eats food, and chemical energy is 
thus transformed directly into nervous and muscular energy, with- 
out passing through the form of physical heat energy, and, thus, 
perhaps without being directly subject to the law of entropy. 
Thus human energy is applied to arrest the process of degradation 
of physical energy, and to turn it into more available channels for 
the satisfaction of human wants. Thus man increases his own 
power, lengthens his own life, improves the chances of life for his 
offspring, multiplies his wants and their satisfactions ; in short he 
enlarges and enhances the psychical values of existence ; but always 
subject of the irreversible directions of the order of nature, as 
expressed in the second law of thermodynamics. 

Increase of entropy dogs the footsteps of life, to issue in abso- 
lute death, unless we admit the possibility of some creative source 
of physical energy beyond our present ken. Such a source would 
be beyond the range of the purely mechanical conception of 
nature. 4 

Perhaps the marvelous manifestations of intra-atomic energy 
revealed in radioactive transformations give an inkling of how 
such a creative source may work. The facts of radioactivity may 
require the modification, or limitation of scope, of the second law 
of thermodynamics. 

3. The law of the conservation of energy is frequently taken 
to be the basic principle of nature and to imply the absolute 
validity of mechanism. If the sum total of energy in the universe 
is constant, then every change in nature can mean only a quanti- 
tative alteration of relations among finite constellations of energy ; 
and the universe must be a huge automatic machine whose parts 
may undergo innumerable alterations of position ; but which, as a 
whole, preserves its identical character as a fixed quantity. The 
law of the conservation of energy proves nothing of the sort. In 
the first place, "energy" is a conceptual abstraction. What is 
found in concrete nature is an unceasing variety of qualitative 
changes, going through more or less definite sequences. In terms 
of conventional constants of "work," which means primarily the 
ability to move something against gravitational attraction, or 

*For example the " sorting demon' ' of J. Clerk Maxwell's hypothesis is 
such an extramechanistic notion. 



270 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

against some counteracting force, quantitative ratios have been 
established as approximately true for many of these transforma- 
tions. In making these determinations the physicist abstracts 
from the qualitative uniqueness of the concrete empirical processes. 
He does not "explain" the actual complexities of the qualitative 
changes involved. His energy, which is assumed to be constant, is 
a construction of the scientific imagination. He postulates, and 
approximately verifies, its constancy only within the limits of 
finite and determinable closed systems of physical energy. He 
can know nothing of an absolute sum total of energy. The con- 
servation of energy is a working hypothesis which works within 
given finite mechanical systems. 

To say that the sum total of energy in the absolute system of 
the universe is constant seems to me unmeaning. If it be a sum 
total, then the energy of the universe must be a so much, however 
unimaginably great; it must be a finite quantity. A quantity is 
relative to a unit, hence the universe must consist of a finite 
number of units of energy. But our estimation through units is 
relative and, since the universe is relative to nothing else, it can- 
not be regarded as a finite quantity. Again, energy is the power 
of doing work, and to do work is to move something. Nothing 
moves the whole universe from one place to another, and the 
universe does not move itself against any obstacle. There seems 
to be no meaning in saying that the universe, in the sense of the 
absolute totality of things, does work. 

Moreover, since any sum total, however great, is a finite quan- 
tity, if the universe has existed through indefinite past time, then, 
in accordance with the law of the degradation of energy the uni- 
verse must long since have completely run down to the state of 
maximum entropy, and be now in a state of complete quiescence 
and death, all energy having long since passed into forms unavail- 
ing for the maintenance of life. Suppose, on the other hand, that 
the universe be assumed to have had a beginning in time. Then, 
to account for this beginning, one must go behind the principles of 
mechanics. And, if one suppose that in its present state it is a 
purely mechanical system, then a state must finally come about in 
which the universe will be an inert mass of uniform temperature. 
Then there will no longer be any work done, and, since energy 
means the power of doing work, all energy will have vanished from 
our supposed universe. 



EVOLUTION, LIFE AND MIND 271 

In brief, if the working postulates and conceptions of abstract 
mechanics and physics be set up as absolute metaphysical dogmas 
we run into a series of contradictions. The attempt to turn the 
concepts and formulae of physics directly into metaphysics breaks 
down. The total universe cannot be a finite system of mechanical 
energies, and the laws of mechanics are not adequate expressions 
of the total reality. The obvious reason is that the procedure of 
mechanics is adapted to deal only with certain highly abstract 
aspects of the concrete world, namely, a thought constructed and 
conventional realm of pure space, time, motion, and mass. 5 

Every event in nature is the resultant of an indefinite com- 
plexity of determining conditions. In the quest for causal con- 
nections as naturalists we rightly ignore this indefinite complexity, 
since it would involve us in an endless search. We pick out*the 
immediate and relatively constant antecedent of the particular 
type of event that we desire to account for. This antecedent is 
always one that, for the special purpose in hand, we can treat as 
the cause. The purpose may be to fix the guilt of a crime, to 
determine the conditions of profit in an industry, or to formulate 
a mechanical relation in physics or chemistry. The rigid bodies, 
the different types of motion, the lines and fields of force, or the 
atoms and electrons, of the physicist, are just as truly purposive 
constructions as are the "adaptations" and "selective agencies" of 
the biologist. And the latter are just as truly purposive construc- 
tions as the legal and moral constructions which we employ to 
interpret our complex social life. 

It is by this method of abstraction and purposive construction 
that science arrives at its mechanico-causal formulae. The teem- 
ing qualitative diversity of concrete experience is reduced thereby 
to identities of relation. The actual bases of these thought-con- 
structed identities are incomplete similarities in the sequences of 
events. Kepetition of resembling cases is the experiential ground 
for our causal determinations. Probably no two instances of 
causal change are absolutely the same. 



6 These concepts as employed in physics are all convenient working ab- 
stractions, not accurate pictures of reality. Cf. James Ward, Naturalism and 
Agnosticism, passim. 



272 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

III. Evolution and Teleology 

Actual life and experience live in the present and forwards 
towards the future, while causal theory explains retrospectively. 
It tries to account for the present, which is real, by* the artificial 
reconstruction of a past which no longer exists; but the ultimate 
value and purpose of all causal explanation is to enable the beings 
who make it, and can use it, to use the abstract skeletons of causal 
explanation in their present living experience in order to achieve 
in the future more satisfactory experience. All retrospection, 
from an individual's judgment of his own past to a review of the 
history of humanity, of life and the solar system, has its meaning 
and value solely in its uses for the enrichment and harmonization 
of life and experience, which is life as it feels to living individuals. 
Reality is living and prospective. Its historical retrospections 
are for the enhancement of its living forward movement. Life is 
individuated, and it moves towards increase of individuation and 
association. There is, in reality, no static and mechanical nature, 
except as a figment of the geometrizing intellect. Living nature 
is the forward movement of individuals towards increasing indi- 
viduation and association, which is the complement of individua- 
tion. Evolution is a living analytic-synthetic or differentiating 
and integrating process, moving towards more individuation. The 
continuity of direction in the whole process can be understood fully 
in terms akin to what in human life is meant by value-inspired 
activity. When a new type of individual has appeared on the 
scene, we may, with fair measure of success, find close analogies 
to already existing types. Man is a good deal like the anthropoid 
ape. It may be true that the aboriginal man was first cousin to 
the ape. It may be true that there were apelike men before there 
were men, although I do not see by what right anyone can assert 
that there were with dogmatic certainty. Man may have appeared 
subsequently or prior to, or simultaneously with, the ape. At any 
rate, the differences between man and the ape are more significant 
for man and more disastrous for the ape than the resemblances of 
the two. The fallacy to which the mechanical evolutionist is most 
prone is the fallacy which consists in covertly assuming, where 
similarities or superficial identities of structure and behavior are 
found, that these are the all-important matters, and that the 
differences, uniquenesses, novelties are unimportant and therefore 



EVOLUTION, LIFE AND MIND 273 

nonexistent. The differences between truth and error, good and 
evil, happiness and unhappiness, success and failure, often turn 
on what, viewed quantitatively, are very slight matters; but the 
differences, in terms of meaning and consequence, may be tre- 
mendous. For life, action and feeling, differences are, as a rule, 
more important than resemblances. The same is true for the 
interpretation of the evolution process. 

The actual world is a dynamic interplay of mutually adaptive 
energy centers. It is due, in its present phase, to the interplay in 
the past of energy centers ("monads"). The mutual adaptations 
of plants and animals and their environments ; the interactions of 
organisms ; the influences of soil, water, and climate on organisms ; 
the influences of organisms on the soil, water, and probably even 
on climate: — all these are cases of dynamic interrelationship that 
transcend the categories of mere mechanism. We are not to seek 
the evidence for the dominance of livingness and its teleological 
efficacy, in the sense of its power of increasing subjugation of 
inorganic energies to the maintenance and enhancement of life, in 
any partial or special features in the evolution process. The best 
evidence for an immanent teleology is to be found in the whole 
system of dynamic and organic interrelatedness of the factors in 
evolution; and in the presence of a continuous thread or trend 
which, interwoven with the stuff of life, in the ceaselessly working 
loom of time, displays its pattern more clearly with the movement 
of the ages. The pattern is the growth and maintenance of indi- 
viduality in association — the trend of the evolution process towards 
personality. 

The Darwinians hold that natural selection, of those chance 
variations in the structure and functions of organs which fit their 
fortunate possessors to survive in the struggle for existence, is the 
chief method of organic evolution. Most of them admit other 
factors, such as sexual selection; and some of them admit, to a 
limited extent, the inheritance of the effects of use and disuse. 
Either they do not attempt to account for the origin of variations, 
or they assume that the origin, as well as the selection, of variations 
is due to the action of the physical environment. The intraorganic 
factors are the products of the extraorganic factors. The organism 
throughout its history is thus the passively moulded product of 
physical forces. 

The direct stimulus of the environment alone does not account 



274 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

for the origin and cumulative persistence of the most significant 
variations. Organisms are not copies or replicas of the environ- 
ment, for their adaptive responses to external stimuli are very 
diversified and often complicated. Moreover, as Bergson has so 
effectively pointed out in his discussion of the eyes of the molluscs 
and vertebrates, organs differing in structure but similar in func- 
tion have been developed along quite divergent lines of evolution. 6 

An organ such as the eye represents very manifold and complex 
delicately adjusted correlations. The whole organism of a higher 
mammal is a marvelously complex machine. That these correla- 
tions could have resulted from the chance persistence of chance 
combinations in the blind permutations and combinations of mass 
particles is improbable. A much coarser machine fashioned in 
human society implies an end. Why not then the whole infinitely 
complex adjustments and correlations of organisms? The very 
simplest and most general terms employed in biology — adjustment, 
adaptation, variation, selection, use, growth — are teleological or 
axiological concepts. 

Vital evolution has taken definite directions along certain 
main lines. It has passed from the generalized to the specialized, 
from the homogeneous to the heterogenous, as Herbert Spencer 
put it. Evolution, however, has not been a simple change from 
the generalized to the specialized; for intelligence, the ruling 
power in human evolution, is the most highly generalized and 
supple instrument for the production of specialized adaptations 
to be found in the whole of nature. All man's specialization of 
organs are tributary to the generic function of intelligence, by 
virtue of which the latter is able to fashion and use new inventions, 
new specialties. Thus, with the supremacy of intelligence, the 
evolution process enters upon a decidedly new phase. Man, the 
tool maker, becomes the builder of civilization. 

With constancy of external conditions there has taken place 
divergence of direction in organic types, but not the indefinite and 
chaotic diversity which would not strike out and hold to certain 
paths. The persistence of divergent development in a few chan- 
nels, at first parallel and then separating more widely, is evidence, 
both of an original power of individualized responsiveness to the 
external situation, and of a capacity to hold to and enhance the 

"Bergson, Creative Evolution, Chaps. 1 and 2. 



EVOLUTION, LIFE AND MIND 275 

kinds of response already made. Vital evolution is ortJiogenetic, 
in the general sense that it displays the persistence of specific 
directions. That this orthogenesis is not the mechanical result of 
the moulding power of the environment seems to be shown by the 
varied character of this persistence of direction. Moreover, the 
mere fact of variation does not account for the survival and trans- 
mission of variations in enhanced degree; such that they become 
important factors in the survival of their possessors. In order that 
correlated variations may become useful they must first be there 
and persist. What preserves the organism before the variations in 
question have become useful weapons in the struggle, and what 
enables a succession of generations to add their mites of increase 
to these same variations ? Finally, there are many variations 
which seem to be without any purely survival value, such as rich 
coloration, and a multitude of minor variations in structure and 
ornamentation of organisms. Of what survival value are all the 
songs, colors, and activities of birds ? Life seems very prodigal 
in its manifestations of formative energy. 

In man there is still a more abundant outcrop of seemingly 
useless variations, such as his play, aesthetic, and speculative im- 
pulses. These are doubtless useful, in the long run and in the 
highest sense, by enhancing the dignity and value of his social and 
spiritual life, but they are without survival value in the physical 
struggle for individual existence. If the one ruling principle of 
vital evolution be the mechanical moulding of organisms by en- 
vironmental forces, these qualities are unaccountable miracles. 

Progressive adaptation, by which organisms gain the power in 
increasing degree to dominate the environment, is a teleological 
principle ; no matter how in detail this adaptation may be achieved. 
The details may be susceptible of mechanical statement, may have 
become habit mechanisms; but the whole movement is supra- 
mechanical. Useful variations originate, doubtless evoked some- 
how by the demands of the environment on organisms to maintain 
themselves ; but the power of response in a diversity of ways, some 
of which are cumulative and persistent, implies teleological activ- 
ity in the organism; not a force that works unerringly, but one 
that achieves its ends by the trial and error method. Teleology in 
this general sense by no means implies conscious design or purpose. 
It does imply persistent striving in definite directions towards 
individuality, and this striving does eventuate finally, through 



276 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

specific physicochemical combinations, in sentient selfhood, in pro- 
visional adjustment to and reshaping of the environment. Mech- 
anism is everywhere present and nowhere the final interpretation. 
There is an immanent cosmic teleology operating in organisms. 

IV. Life and Matter 

Does vital evolution exhibit the working out of a single pre- 
designed plan ? The diversities, wastes, failures, monstrosities of 
life negative such an assumption. Bergson has pointed out that 
the error of radical finalism is to assume that the whole is given 
at one blow as a timeless actuality and that, by consequence, every 
step in the process is predetermined. Such a notion makes it 
inconceivable why there should be any evolution or any imperfec- 
tions in the life process. Why should not the whole order of life 
have appeared and continued complete and perfect? His own 
theory seems to be that matter is the negative or obstructive factor 
in the evolution of life, an assemblage of obstacles which the life 
force must overcome in order to progress. Life is a finite impetus 
which must insinuate itself in matter, must compromise and use 
evasive and circuitous methods, in order to surmount the obstacles 
presented to it by matter. Actual evolution is the result of this 
struggle between life and matter. The vital impetus persistently 
experiments with ways and means to get itself forward and upward 
against the downward pull of matter. On the other hand he some- 
times treats matter, that is, spatial extension, as if it were a by- 
product of life itself. The dualism is put into the vital impetus. 
Thus self-diremption or dialectic is conceived to dwell in the very 
heart of life and to move it from within. 

This dualistie conception of the relation of life and matter I 
find unsatisfactory. Firstly, it seems to imply that the obstruc- 
tiveness of matter is the chief cause of individual and racial varia- 
tion and of death. Life without matter would then have been one 
immense and changeless ocean of being. Its impulse towards 
individuality and effort derives from life's being blocked or 
hemmed in by matter. Thus the one cosmic soul is fragmented 
into the multitude of finite individual souls, each freighted with 
a bit of the vital urge (Velan vital). It is really a negative con- 
ception of the function of matter. It does not differ, in principle, 
from the Platonic- Aristotelian concept of matter as the partially 



EVOLUTION, LIFE AND MIND 277 

hindering condition, which is also the potency of individual exist- 
ences. I do not think that death is a triumph of matter over life. 
It appears rather to be, in large measure, at least, the result of 
the struggle of life with life — of the more complex forms of life 
with the simpler. The germ theory of disease supports the latter 
view. It may be, however, that normally death, in the higher 
organisms, such as man, is but a change of material investiture, 
a critical phase of development. The old body, no longer adequate, 
may be left to the simpler organisms to use up. 

Secondly, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and 
sulphur are the direct material potentialities of life. Other chem- 
ical substances further life. The physical environment is fitted to 
be the theater of vital evolution in a positive sense. It is a plati- 
tude to say that the fact that organisms exist and multiply estab- 
lishes the fitness of the material environment. 

Thirdly, matter is not in itself a sufficient explanation of 
variation and individuality; and the increase of individuality is 
the meaning of evolution. My own view is that matter is the 
positive potentiality of vital organization. Matter in itself prob- 
ably consists of simple and relatively unorganized centers of 
activity. The forms of individuation intermediate between unor- 
ganized matter and living organisms, such as the crystal, represent 
the first steps towards organization. Vital evolution is the organ- 
ization of more complex individuals from these simpler centers of 
activity. 

There are three levels of individuation. (1) The mere par- 
ticulae or individua of the physical universe. These are the dis- 
crete elements of matter — electrons or other unit centers of 
physical activity. But physical individua are not true individuals. 
They are meeting points of general relations or centers of inter- 
ference in the flux of physical forces. Gravitational and electrical 
attraction, the lines and fields of force of magnetic and electrical 
theory, are phenomena of this general relationship. Physical indi- 
vidua are centers of activity, but their centrality is subordinate 
and their individuality poor and abstract. They are discrete units 
or differentiations in a continuous medium — the ether, or what- 
ever may take the place of the ether in order to afford a con- 
ceptual basis for the dynamical interrelations of physical elements. 
Physical individua are but eddies in the stream of physical 
becoming. Their natures are exhausted in their external relation- 



278 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

ships. They have only being-f or-another no being-f or-self , no self- 
maintaining center of individuality. 

(2) The living organism more nearly approaches true indi- 
viduality. It has greater complexity and unity of structure and 
function than a physical individuum. It has the beginnings of 
being-f or-self, of self -related and self -maintaining individuality. 
Anabolism, self-movement, irritability and sensitivity, are phenom- 
ena of individual self-maintenance. Reproduction, and death are 
phenomena of relationship and dependence of the individual on 
the species and the environment. 7 The organism uses the physical 
individua which are its components, to develop more individuality. 
All its forces and elements are chemical and physical, but its power 
of rearrangement and synthesis of these elements shows that it is 
a higher and more complex individual unity. It develops highly 
differentiated structures which function as an integrated whole. 
The essence of the organism is organizing individuality. 8 Yet a 
mere organism is not a true self. The constituent cells and tissues 
are easily thrown off or grafted onto other organisms. The cells 
have a relatively large amount of independence. In reproduction 
the individual organism shows its dependence on the species or 
type. The self -maintaining power of the organism, its organizing 
principle of synthesis, seems to stand in a relatively external rela- 
tion to its constituent elements. The protozoa are vague and fluid 
unities, and even the higher metazoa are communities of individua 
which are not wholly merged in the unity of the individual. The 
evolution of organisms is a progress in individuation, vn that its 
successive steps are stages m increasing domination of the en- 
vironment, in a change from relative passivity to greater relative 
activity and self-assertion. Contrast an amoeba with a civilized 
man in this respect. The domination of the environment has been 
accomplished through the growth of the sensori-motor system cul- 
minating in the development of the cerebral nervous system, the 
instrument for the control of more remote environmental relations 
in time and space. 

(3) Mind alone is capable of full individuality or selfhood. 

x Cf. Hegel on Life, Wallace's Logic of Hegel, pp. 358 ft. 

8 The doctrine that the organism is an individual whole and that life is 
eternal is developed in a very interesting fashion in the recent work by 
Professor "W. E. Eitter, The Unity of the Organism. I am not clear as to 
whether he regards consciousness as coeval with the organism or a product of 
certain causal interactions between the organism and the environment. 



EVOLUTION, LIFE AND MIND 279 

It supervenes upon and uses the bodily organism as its locus of 
operation. Mind is the most intimate and integrated type of 
totality. Its elements have no existence apart from the unity. 
Mind is at once capable of very great complexity of structure and 
of a corresponding integrity of operation. Whereas, physical indi- 
vidua seem but abstract meeting points of general relations or 
forces, and whereas, in organisms the balance between the indi- 
viduum or principle of synthesis and the dependence of its con- 
stituent elements and functions on the relationship to the environ- 
ment is so unstable that the organism is ever on the point of 
dissolution into physical elements, mind is a creative as well as 
irradiating center of relationships, by virtue of which it dominates 
not only the immediate environment but controls to a large degree 
the more remote environment— the spatial relations in the distance 
and the temporal sequences bound up with these more distant 
connections. Thus a mind alone has true individuality, has being- 
in-and-for-self. It maintains itself by expanding into a fuller 
focus for cosmic relationships, and it enriches its being in depth 
by union with other minds. 

Evolution is the process by which individual "souls" are 
fashioned. The successive levels which we have just considered 
are the main stages in the making of souls. The relatively bare 
individuality of physical force centers is the precondition of the 
living organism, which arises through the synthesis of a specific 
complex of physical centers. Whether every low-grade organism 
is sentient or not it is not possible to say definitely. But certainly 
organic irritability or sensitivity is the precondition of sentience. 
It is probable that the high tension created by the concentration 
and association of avenues and centers of organic irritability 
through a nervous system gives rise to sentience. The latter was 
at first evanescent, a momentary and fleeting consciousness with- 
out memory or reflection. It became more definitely organized, 
as the sense organs and centers were differentiated and coordinated 
with the instinctive motor reactions. As yet there was not a true 
self. There was soul, but no self. The biological soul life, once 
organized and developing into greater complexity and significance, 
as instrument of organic adaptation and domination of the environ- 
ment, became a continuous and expanding factor in evolution. 
The temporal continuity of psychical life, in the succession of the 
generations, is a highly warranted hypothesis, which accounts for 



280 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the facts of psychical heredity. The elementary psychical varia- 
tions in individuals and species are probably due to the new com- 
binations of psychical capacity ever being struck out by conjuga- 
tion. This inheritance of psychical unit characters, in the shape 
of instinct, impulse, and power of discrimination of the senses, 
and the activity and persistence of higher tendencies, which com- 
bine through crossing to produce a rich variety of temperaments or 
original natures in individuals, I do not doubt to be the natural 
basis of the human soul. Everyone who has studied the psychical 
resemblances of individuals to their ancestors has collected evi- 
dences that personalities, even of the more creative types, may 
largely be accounted for by the fortunate combinations of ancestral 
qualities which were isolated in their parents, grandparents or 
more remote ancestors. 9 Goethe's well-known words have often 
been cited in this connection : 

Vom Vater hdb' Ich die Statur 
Des Leben's ernstes Fuehren 
Vom Mutter chen die Frohnatur 
Urn Lust zu fabulieren. 

The case of the "Jukes," a race of degenerates on the one hand, 
and the descendants of Jonathan Edwards on the other hand, are 
striking evidences in point. 10 

There is more in the true self or person than an inherited 
complex of psychical tendencies. Thus far "Die Theile Tiabt Ihr 
in der Hand, fehlt leider nur das geistige Band." These tend- 
encies are fused in the alembic of the "spirit" or 'principle of 
intellectual synthesis, which is the source of memory, analytic 
reflection, creative mental synthesis and rational will. The 
rational principle, which uses and controls the inherited tendencies 
of the biological soul life, cannot be derived from the latter. It 
is the creative principle of self-activity which functions in and 
through the biological soul and fashions the latter into a person- 
ality. This is the moral and rational "spirit" or selfhood. 

Souls, then, are indeed fashioned in the creative process of 
evolution. Biological souls, through the operation of the "higher" 
principle of creative synthesis, become rational selves. Whence is 
this creative principle derived? Here one reaches the limits of 

9 The Mendelian theory of heredity, of course, supports this view. 

10 Walter, Genetics, Chap. 11. 



EVOLUTION, LIFE AND MIND 281 

experience and can only conjecture. The birth, from out the 
biological soul, of a rational and moral spirit or person points to 
the hypothesis that here one finds in the realm of the finite a 
principle which transcends the finite ; in the evolution of life the 
self-expression of an ultimate spiritual and cosmic power which 
transcends the evolutionary process and yet is implicated in every 
step thereof. This hypothesis is akin to the view as to the origin 
and destiny of spirit advanced by religious and philosophical 
geniuses, that the spirit in man is the self-manifestation of the 
Divine Spirit, that thus the supreme cosmic spirit imparts himself 
in very truth to the soul of man. The "natural" man, that is, the 
biological man becomes, through the communication of this Divine 
Spark, a moral and rational self. In Leibniz' words spiritual 
monads are born by continuous fulgurations from the Divinity. 

Friendless was the Mighty Lord of Worlds, 

Felt defect — therefore created Spirits 

Blessed mirrors of His blessedness, 

From the chalice of the world of souls 

Foams for Him now infinitude. — Schiller, Friendship. 

The evolution process is the striving of a vast multitude of 
individual centers with increasing individuation and association, 
progressing from blind self -maintenance and reproduction to 
rational self-determination. The failures, wastes, blind alleys, 
which life so often leads into, result from the fact that the system 
of animate nature is an open and developing system of individ- 
uated centers capable of effort and progress. If it be asked why 
the growth of life must take place in this way, why it should not 
be the placid unfolding of a perfectly predetermined plan, the onjy 
answer at hand is that growth through trial and error, and by 
effort, is the one way in which we can think the evolution of a 
world which brings forth ever enriching individuality, as it is the 
one way in which we can think the education of an individual. 

In the human order mind becomes the dominant factor in the 
life system. It fashions the world of social and historical experi- 
ence and tradition. Mind is the parent of language, industrial 
advance, the arts, manners, morals, sciences, and religions; by 
virtue of these, man's evolution becomes a cultural and purposive 
process which creates and maintains enjoyed values, in contrast 
with the blind striving, towards value, of subhuman nature. Thus 



282 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

personality is the end term in the evolutionary process. Thus the 
physical order is made the servant of the type of being who seems 
to have emerged from its own bosom. 

That which makes the evolution process more than a bare suc- 
cession of atomic and jarring events is the continuity of its ever 
increasing movement towards personality. When one speaks of 
the evolution of the stellar cosmos, describe its elements and suc- 
cessive features how one may, the total meaning of the process is 
that its earlier and more chaotic conditions have eventuated in a 
cosmos. Cosmos could hardly have come from apparent chaos 
unless there was order or definite tendency at work in the chaos. 
What we commonly call chaos is only a different sort or phase of 
order. 11 

The determining factors of organic evolution have full mean- 
ing only as contributing elements in a process which is continuous 
and significant in what it brings forth. Certain values are at- 
tained, and the process passes through these to the achievement of 
still richer values. The biologist may disclaim any attempt to pass 
judgment on the values achieved in the process of evolution. He 
may say that man is not necessarily in any sense of value a higher 
animal than an amoeba, but only a more complex organism, with 
more structures and functions and hence more troubles. But the 
biologist, nevertheless, does and must regard man as better 
equipped biologically for adjustment, self -maintenance, and self- 
development than an amoeba, and when he pursues, with utter 
devotion, his science, he tacitly at least, admits that the life of a 
civilized thinking being is of more worth than the life of a jelly- 
fish. Biologically man is the highest animal because, in Professor 
Sherrington's words, he is best fitted to dominate his environ- 
ment. 12 This domination becomes in turn the biological basis for 
the attainment of the spiritual life, the life of truly human culture 
which means the re-creation of the environment under the guid- 
ance of humanistic values. 

The single thread of continuity or meaning, then, which binds 
together the successive stages of evolution is the emergence and 
increasing dominance of personal spirit or mind as the true home 
of values. Nature is the prelude to culture. Material and vital 

11 Cf. Bergson, Creative Evolution, Chap. 3. 

12 C. S. Sherrington. The Integrative Action of the Central Nervous 
System. 



EVOLUTION, LIFE AND MIND 283 

evolution are the overtures to man's realization of personality, by 
the organization and development of social cultural life. That 
the great epic of personality is as yet only imperfectly unfolded 
constitutes not a ground for pessimism but for hope. The process 
is a slow and severe one, but when man casts his reflective gaze 
backwards he may well be cheered and nerved to his great tasks by 
the long vista of progress behind him. It is a possibility so remote 
and unimaginable that we may intelligently reject it, to suppose 
that the entire evolution process, with its eventuation in spiritual 
culture, is simply and solely the result of a blind and contingent 
rearrangement of mass particles in space. If it is difficult to 
conceive that Plato's philosophy or Shakespeare's dramas could 
have occurred accidentally by the chance coincidence of the letters 
of the Greek or English alphabets, it is vastly more difficult to con- 
ceive that the continuity of order, direction, and outcome of the 
whole evolutionary process can have been the result of blind chance. 
Whereas in human activity purpose means a foreseen and 
consciously willed end, in a very large fraction of biological 
processes there seems to be no clear evidence of conscious foresight. 
Are we then to admit unconscious teleology ? It seems to me that 
we must regard unconscious 'teleology, the unconscious achieve- 
ment of values, as playing a very considerable role in nature. The 
great bulk of organic functions, such as metabolism, the circulation 
and aeration of the blood, the summation of stimuli in the sense 
organs and cortical centers, are normally performed without con- 
sciousness. These functions are certainly teleological in their 
results. There are many instinctive psychical tendencies which 
begin without foresight, although they may be accompanied by 
consciousness. Such are the self-preservative reactions of anger, 
fear, simulation. Again there are the secondarily automatic or 
habitual modes of action which are acquired with consciousness, 
but are afterwards performed unconsciously; for example, walk- 
ing, running, and, in general, operations involving manual skill. 
Perhaps, as some genetic psychologists hold, 13 all organic move- 
ments were originally accompanied by consciousness. At any 
rate there is no inherent difficulty in the conception of uncon- 
sciously useful and end-realizing activities. Even rational man 
often finds that the ends at which he consciously aimed were not 



"Wilhelm Wundt, for example. 



284 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the true ends of his activities, and, in failing to achieve his pur- 
poses as he planned them, he has accomplished larger and worthier 
ends. 

The lower animal organisms and plants are probably devoid of 
any foresight of the ends of their activities. 

The older theories of creative intelligence, which made the 
world and wound it up like a perpetual and vastly intricate clock- 
work, and which intervened in the world process only on special 
occasions to work out some particular aim or make some improve- 
ment which has arisen in the Divine Mind as an afterthought 
consequent upon an unforeseen derangement of the cosmical ma- 
chines, are thoroughly discredited. The notion of a special provi- 
dence which, for example, answers prayers for rain or for succor 
from natural catastrophes by disturbing the causal sequences of 
nature, or which punishes the wickedness of a St. Pierre or a 
Messina by an earthquake and volcanic eruption, is incompatible 
with the conception of the system of nature as an orderly whole. 
The immanent purposiveness of nature consists in the systematic 
totality and continuity of life-realizing capacities, 14 possessed and 
exercised by its individual members. This does not mean that the 
entire order of nature may not be the self-expression of a Creative 
Activity which transcends nature. Of this, more anon. In the 
system of nature only conscious individuals are values-in-them- 
selves, since only conscious individuals can become ends-for- 
themselves and for one another. The values of natural evolution 
are concentrated and summated in persons. 

I have already referred to the seeming great waste, useless suf- 
fering and purposeless failure strewn by the wayside along the 
slow and toilsome pathway of nature's evolution. Why this im- 
mense and never wholly eliminated imperfection of the process, if 
nature be indeed a value-realizing system ? I shall not here fore- 
stall what I shall have to say later in regard to the specific problem 
of evil in the life of man. I desire now to point out in regard to 
this most general form of the question: 1. Teleology or value- 
production has no meaning apart from the striving and self- 
activity through which obstacles are surmounted, and apparently 
alien and stubborn materials are transmuted into instrumentalities 
of achievement. If life be teleological, then life is impossible 

14 Cf. Aristotle 's Entelechies. 



EVOLUTION, LIFE AND MIND 285 

without self -activity and striving against hindrances. 2. A world 
of living individuals is unthinkable without conflict and striving. 
The self-active elements of this world interact as members in an 
inter-related totality, elements in a self -organizing system. In this 
each must suffer as well as act, since each is a member of a world, 
and has at best only a relative independence. And life, individual- 
ity, self-conscious will and reason, can exist only through purposive 
striving. A world of feeling and thinking beings without interests 
to be satisfied and ends to be willed is surely unintelligible. 

Leibniz' question — is this the best of all possible worlds? — 
only serves to throw dust in our eyes. Any other world that may 
be imagined will be only a variant of this one. The actual world 
is neither the best nor the worst of many possible worlds. Since 
it is actual it is the only really possible world. One world at a 
time ! If you ask, why this motley world, your question is mean- 
ingless. "Motley's the garb we wear." There can be no ulterior 
reason why the universe, that is the organized whole of existence, 
is as it is. Such a reason would imply an antecedent universe, that 
is the existence of something before anything existed, which would 
be the nonexistent ground of existence. 



BOOK IV 

PERSONALITY AND ITS VALUES— PHILOSOPHY 
OF SELFHOOD AND SOCIETY 



CHAPTEE XXII 

THE PROBLEM OF PERSONALITY 

Among empirical existents human personality is the richest 
monad, the fullest microcosm. It is a vortex in the universal flux. 
All the forces of the universe flow through it. It is suhject to all 
the winds and tides of cosmic weather ; it is bestial and Godlike, 
compounded of clay and fire. It rises from the slime and ooze of 
the primal world stuff to the contemplation of the stars, to love 
stronger than death, to creative imaginings of an ideal world. It 
visions values which, could they be realized in society, would make 
of mankind a Godlike community. It is racked by pain and driven 
bv hunger and lust. But it can live and die for loved ones, for 
a country, for a cause, for an illusion. It is moved by consuming 
greed and can give, asking nothing in return. It lives by bread 
but not by bread alone; it can make the earth a shambles or a 
garden of peace, justice and friendship. All the counter currents 
and conflicts of the universe live in intensified individuation in 
the soul of man. Mankind produces a Caligula and a Jesus, a 
Caesar Borgia and a St. Francis, a gibbering idiot and a Shakes- 
peare. In man, the most complex and contradictory individuation 
of the universal forces, lives the best key to the interpretation of 
the meaning of the whole; the best key, since all other keys are 
manmade, and man himself is the final clew to all the partial clews 
he makes or finds. 

In view of the lack of agreement in the use of the terms indi- 
viduality, selfhood and 'personality and the corresponding concrete 
terms individual, self and person, I shall now define briefly the 
sense in which these terms are used by me. The full significance 
of these definitions can only be appreciated by a consideration of 
the whole drift of our discussion. 

By individual I mean any being that is an indivisible unity of 
diverse parts or aspects and, hence, in which the unity and the 
diversity are interdependent. An individual can be divided or 
disintegrated, but then it ceases to be itself ; it loses its distinctive 

289 



290 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

character as a whole and its individuality cannot be restored. An 
organism is an individual ; a machine is not, since its parts can be 
assembled, taken apart and reassembled. In a machine parts of 
like structure can be substituted at will. This is partially true of 
an organism; and indeed, an organism has a mechanical basis; 
but, in the latter, the substituted parts must grow into the whole. 
In grafting or inserting a part in an organism we are dealing with 
colonies of subindividuals. A living cell is a subindividual and 
the whole organism a community of subindividuals. Thus indi- 
viduality involves living unity-in-diversity or organization, dis- 
tinctness and relations. It involves uniqueness of being and life, 
but not isolation. 

In a broad sense an individual is a self, but I shall usually 
confine the application of the term "self to conscious individuals. 

By person I shall mean a well-organized and reflective or 
rational individual ; a being that is aware of, and lives consciously 
in, its relations ; that realizes its life, and knows itself as such, as 
a thinking and self-active self, a responsible center of thought, 
valuation and choice; unique and having immediate and, in a 
sense, absolute value as just this center of spiritual life, while the 
felt content and meaning of this unique life is filled up with sig- 
nificant thoughts and deeds of which feeling is the mother-liquor 
or matrix. In short, a person, while unique and private in its 
inner existence, realizes the worth of true existence through con- 
stantly going beyond or transcending its mere selfhood and living 
in universal relations to nature, fellowman and God. A person 
is a "spirit." It means the same as "soul" in popular usage, when 
the implications of popular usage are thought out. A self is an 
ego, but a person is more than a mere ego. A person is an indi- 
vidual self, but an individual self need not be an actualized person. 
A self contains the potentiality of personality. 

In recent objective idealism, notably in the works of Messrs. 
Koyce, Bradley and Bosanquet, the term individuality is used, I 
think, in much the same sense as the term personality is here used. 
I have departed from their usage, on the ground that my own is 
more in harmony with the development of the terminology of 
western thought. Through the history of western thought, from 
the establishment of Christianity as a doctrinal system, the prevail- 
ing tendency in religious, ethical and political thought has been 
to use the term personality to designate the qualities or character- 



THE PROBLEM OF PERSONALITY 291 

istics of the most all-inclusive or most universal, rational and 
ethical or spiritual individuality or selfhood. The person is not 
merely unique or distinctive, but at once the most deeply inward 
self-determining and worthful and the most universal or deeply 
and widely related type of selfhood. It is spirit ; and, I may add, 
to speak of impersonal "spirit" seems to me to be to talk nonsense. 1 

I proceed now to consider the nature and relations of selfhood 
and its evolution into its highest form, personality. 

The following may be taken, by way of introduction, as a gen- 
eral characterization of a conscious self: (1) The self is a unity 
which persists through changing experiences. However much my 
ideas and feelings may vary from time to time, I experience, and, 
through memory, am conscious of a continuing thread of self- 
identity which binds these changing events of conscious life to- 
gether into the life of myself. ( 2 ) The self is complex. My self lives 
in, attends to, and is controlled by, different ideas and feelings, 
and takes different attitudes in work and play, in business life, in 
the family circle, in society, and in private meditation. (3) The 
self is felt as a unique individuality. In normal life the self- 
identities even of lovers or intimate friends are not confused. 
Even "two hearts that beat as one, two souls with but a single 
thought" remain forever two. Two friends may have similar ideas 
and feelings about politics, art, religion and philosophy, but they 
do not thereby become one self. Damon and Pythias remain dis- 
tinct selves to the end of the chapter. (4) The self lives and is 
conscious only in relation to other selves and to physical things. 
We can frame no notion of what a self would be which did not 
function, as conscious being, in interaction and interpassion with 
other selves and with a physical world. 

In order to gain a fuller insight into the nature of the self 
I shall have recourse to psychological analysis and to the facts 
of psychophysiology and psychophysics. I shall, moreover, be 

*Mr. Clement C. J. Webb in his Gifford Lectures; God and Personality, 
Lectures ii and iv, and Bivme Personality and Human Life, Lecture 
ix, explains the preference of Bosanquet for Individuality over Personality 
as the ultimate principle of reality on the two grounds that the juridical and 
social associations of the term personality suggest its finitude and that the 
ethical notion of complete self -surrender implies the " adjectival' ' or transi- 
tional character of personality. (J. G. Fichte held a similar view.) Both 
these grounds are contested by Mr. Webb — rightly, I hold. Lotze held that 
only the absolute or God can be the true personality; in human beings it 
is imperfect. 



292 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

particularly concerned to insist that, in order to form an adequate 
conception of the self, the latter must be interpreted in terms of its 
social and cultural relationships, and as an active center of valua- 
tion and volition. The present inquiry might, indeed, be called 
Metaphysics and Metasociology. 

What is the relation of the present inquiry to psychology? 
This question cannot be answered in brief and categorical fashion, 
since there is no uniform attitude among psychologists, either as 
to whether there is a place in their science for the concept of the 
self, or as to what it means in psychology. 

In psychology of the structural and analytical type, which dis- 
sects the flux of concrete conscious processes into mental elements 
(sensations, images, impulsions, affections and abstract ideas), 
considered in abstraction from the owner of these processes, there 
is no place for an enduring and unitary self. "Constituent parts 
alone roll on." There is no soul. What the naive mind calls the 
soul or personality is an ever shifting complex of sensations, per- 
ceptions, feelings, images and strivings. 

An excellent statement of the standpoint of analytical and 
structural psychology is the following. Mind, says Titchener, 2 is 
"the sum total of human experience considered as dependent upon 
the experiencing person. We have said, further, that the phrase 
Experiencing person' means the living body, the organized indi- 
vidual ; and we have hinted that, for psychological purposes, the 
living body may be reduced to the nervous system and its attach- 
ments. Mind thus becomes the sum total of human experience 
considered as dependent upon a nervous system. And since human 
experience is always process, occurrence, and the dependent aspect 
of human experience is its mental aspect, we may say, more 
shortly, that mind is the sum total of mental process." "The word 
'self,' as a psychological rubric, means the particular combination 
of talents, temperament, and character that makes up an individual 
mind. Self, as a conscious experience, is any complex of mental 
processes that means some temporary phase of this combination 
and a self-consciousness is a consciousness in which the self, as a 
conscious experience, is focal. It has certain fairly constant con- 
stituents; organic sensations, a visual perception or idea of the 
body, and the verbal ideas of T and 'my\" Titchener further 

2 Textbook of Psychology, p. 16. 



THE PROBLEM OF PERSONALITY 293 

says : "the mental life as the author has lived it is very intermit- 
tently personal." 3 

In short, from the standpoint of this type of psychology the 
so-called mental self is simply one occasional and variable experi- 
ential complex in the total flow of consciousness, and it consists 
chiefly of organic sensations. The belief in a unitary and per- 
sistent principle of selfhood is either to be regarded as a survival 
of the inaccuracies of common sense thinking; or, if it have any 
place in more rigorous thinking, that place is in metaphysics. 

A psychology which sets out to analyze the concrete mental life 
into a complex of sensational and aflectional elements, must, as 
Hume would say, ask in regard to every concept, including that 
of the self — "produce me the corresponding impression !" This is 
a legitimate procedure. A philosopher can have no quarrel with 
any psychologist's right thus to circumscribe and isolate the area 
and method of his investigations, provided only that the psychol- 
ogist sticks to his last, and does not assume that his is the only 
justifiable procedure in dealing with the self. This type of psy- 
chology accepts nothing as a datum which cannot be analyzed out 
as a particular element in an empirical conscious complex. It 
seeks the sensational, affective and imaginistic elements of mind 
and the laws of their coexistence and succession. In the next chap- 
ter I shall try to show that a psychology of this type is, by its very 
starting point and method, shut out from an adequate conception 
of the self. 

The functional type of psychology lays stress on the activities 
and uses of consciousness in the development and maintenance of 
life. The processes of sensation, perception, imagination, judg- 
ment, inference, memory, impulse, emotion, and so forth, are re- 
garded as instruments for conserving and enhancing the life of the 
individual and of the species in their biological and social relation- 
ships. 4 The mind of man is viewed as a weapon in the struggle 
for existence, an instrument of biological adaptation to environ- 
ment, engendered in the evolution process through causes still, in 
large part, unknown. The evolutionary and functional standpoint 
has thrown very valuable light on the place of consciousness in the 
natural order. In estimating the biological significance of con- 

* Ibid., pp. 544, 545. 

4 Wm. James, Principles of Psychology; John Dewey, The Influence of 
Darwin and Other Essays. 



294 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

sciousness it must, however, be borne in mind that the life which 
consciousness thus serves is the life of mind itself, conscious 
and rational life, not mere animal existence. Hence mind is, in 
one sense, the end or aim of its own functioning. Conscious life 
at its higher levels functions for itself. Being an instrument 
which enjoys its own functioning, mind strives to enhance and 
conserve the affective values of its own operations as ends-in-them- 
selves. To have overlooked this truth is the cardinal error of the 
crasser forms of utilitarianism in ethics and social philosophy. 

A third type of psychology, which insists on the central impor- 
tance of the self for psychological investigation, has been called 
"self -psychology" 5 Psychologists of this type insist that con- 
scious processes always belong to an individual, and that to ignore 
this fundamental principle is to distort the facts with which psy- 
chology deals. It will become evident, as we proceed, that the 
standpoint of the present work is very close to that of the self- 
psychology. Indeed, in so far as the present volume is concerned 
with the analysis and description of human nature, its standpoint 
is the same as that of a broadly conceived self -psychology. All 
structural analysis is analysis of the nature of psychical individ- 
uals, and all functional interpretations of mental processes must 
have reference to these processes as functions of human indi- 
viduality. 

Recently, considerable attention has been given to the methods 
of determining the psychological variations of individuals, of de- 
fining the chief significant types of individuality, and of describing 
more accurately the psychical life of individuals in terms of these 
variations. The name "differential psychology" is given to this 
field. It is as yet only in its infancy, but it stands in the very 
closest relation to our present inquiry. In fact, differential" psy- 
chology is concerned, in its larger aspects, precisely with the em- 
pirical groundwork for a philosophy of selves. 6 



B M. W. Calkins, An Introduction to Psychology, and A First "Boole in 
Psychology, 1910; "Psychology as Science of Self"; Journal of Philosophy, 
Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. v, 1908, pp. 12 ff., 64 ff., 113 ff. 
W. Stern, Person und Sache, I; James Ward, article " Psychology, ' ' En- 
cyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, Vol. XXII; the same author, Psychological 
Principles. 

6 The most systematic treatment, thus far, of individual psychology is 
W. Stern's Differentielle Psychologie, Leipzig, 1911. See also, W. Dilthey, 
Beitrdge sum Studium der Individuality. Akad-Ber., Berlin, 1896, pp. 295- 



THE PROBLEM OF PERSONALITY 295 

Lately a professedly new type of psychology has come into 
being calling itself "behaviorism." Psychology is defined as the 
science of human and animal behavior. The radical behaviorist 
insists that psychology is "a purely objective experimental branch 
of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and con- 
trol of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its 
methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the 
readiness with which these lend themselves to introspection in 
terms of consciousness." 7 The behaviorist can write a psychology 
and never use the terms "consciousness, mental state, mind, content, 
introspectively verifiable imagery and the like." 8 

If one wishes to reduce psychology to such terms, he ought "to 
go the whole hog" and deny the existence of a distinct science of 
psychology. It becomes a misleading name for the physiology of 
the nervous and muscular systems in their interrelations. 

The one differentiating attribute of psychology is that it studies 
consciousness, not indeed merely "as such," but as its primary 
datum. Certainly, consciousness behaves, and conscious behavior 
is a specific kind of behavior. It delays reactions to stimuli and 
effects novel junctions between the sensorial system and the motor 
or response system of the organism, thus creating novel types of 
response. 

Psychology must have constant regard to the motor and physi- 
cally and socially objective correlations of consciousness. It must 
make experimental observations upon human beings and animals. 
It must study the behavior of selves in society and solitude, and the 
social obj edifications of psychophysical process in language, social 
customs, institutions and sociopsychical currents. But all these 
materials and methods, to yield psychological results, must be 
interpreted in terms of their relations to consciousness and mind. 
Thus it would not be misleading to define psychology as the science 
of human behavior, provided it be understood that distinctly 
human behavior is the conduct of selves or persons capable of 



335, and my articles "The Study of Individuality, ' ' Philosophical Review, 
Vol. xi, pp. 565-575, and "The Psychological Self and the Actual Personality" 
in the same journal, Vol. xiv, pp. 669-683. 

7 John B. Watson, Psychological Review, Vol. xx, 1913, pp. 158-177, and 
Behavior, A Textbook of Psychology. For a good brief discussion of " self- 
psychology' ' as behavioristic see M. W. Calkins, "The Truly Psychological 
Behaviorism, ' ' Psychological Review, Vol. 28, 1921, pp. 1-18. 

8 Watson, Psychological Review, Vol. xx, p. 166. 



296 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

rational reflection, selective evaluation of interests and motives; 
and, therefore, of conscious, purposive and deliberately chosen 
acts. The extreme behaviorist of to-day regards the self as being 
only an elaborate piece of physicochemical mechanism. The latter 
view is false to the facts of human nature. 9 

There is abroad to-day a theory of the sciences which divides 
the field of theoretical knowledge into the natural sciences and the 
humanistic or social sciences. This division corresponds very well 
to the differences in materials and methods in the study of physical 
nature and human nature, respectively. But if, starting from this 
division, the claim is made that psychology is the basic social or 
humanistic science, of which logic, ethics, aesthetics, sociology, his- 
tory and the science of religion are branches, we must ask — what 
kind of psychology ? 

If psychology be defined as the study simply of neuro-muscular 
mechanisms, certainly it cannot furnish an adequate groundwork 
for logic and ethics ; for, from this standpoint, psychology is but 
a branch of biology and biology a special division of physics ; thus 
the so-called humanistic sciences become branches of physics. But 
there can be no science of any sort, no distinction between truth 
and error, unless there are norms or rational standards of judg- 
ment which are presupposed and used in all systematic inquiry. 
If there is to be science, the logical and ethical norms which the 
investigator must obey, in order truly to know, must be objectively 
valid ; these norms are objective criteria and cannot be mere occa- 
sional products of a complex of mechanical causes. If they were 
but this, judgments of causal connection would not be objectively 
true; they would be mere events on the same level as all sorts of 
errors, follies or crimes. Even if psychology be defined as the 
analytical and causal science of conscious processes it presupposes 
the same norms. In order that truth may be attained by man he 
must obey rational and objective criteria of thinking and conduct 
(thinking is a species of conduct). If logic and ethics are purely 
descriptive sciences of psychophysical events, then there are no 
logical and ethical standards. For the psychologist as such can 
know nothing of true and false unless he employs the logical 



9 A more moderate behaviorism is expounded, in H. C. Warren's Human 
Psychology. Woodworth's Psychology seems to me to include what is of last- 
ing value in the behavioristie standpoint. 



THE PROBLEM OF PERSONALITY 297 

standards ; just as lie can know nothing of good and bad unless he 
employs the ethical standards. Thus to make psychology the sole 
basis of logic and ethics is to destroy the logical and ethical stand- 
ards and to involve in the same ruin psychology and all other 
sciences, since all sciences presuppose that there are objectively 
valid norms of thinking. Logic, the science of the norms and 
methods of correct thinking, is the scientia scientiarum. Ethical 
norms are presupposed in science too, since there is an ethics of 
thought ; it is the duty of the thinker to obey the norms of thought. 

Logical and ethical judgments are judgments of value. Such 
judgments are acts of reason, and reason functions only in per- 
sons. These judgments claim objective validity; and this claim, 
if allowed, will involve the admission that the rational person, in 
making such judgments, is an organ of the ultimate meaning of 
reality. In order that we may know what personality is, it is 
necessary above all, to take full account of those mental acts of the 
self which are embodied or expressed in its logical, ethical, aesthetic 
and religious culture systems. In science, the history of morality, 
the arts, and religion, we find the best clews to the process and mean- 
ing of personality. As creator of intrinsic values and of cultural 
systems for the realization of these values, personality reveals a 
higher level of reality than is expressed in any system of physical or 
even vital forces. Man's cultural and spiritual activity is just as 
truly an offspring of the cosmos as is the most enormous star ; and 
it is much more significant. 

Considerations of the above sort seem to be at the root of the 
movement against "psychologism" and for the priority of logic, in 
recent German philosophy, in which Husserl, Pfander, Scheler, 
Stumpf and others have participated. Th. Lipps and O. Kuelpe 
have tried to combine logic and psychology by giving to the latter 
a broader and more philosophical character than psychology has 
lately taken in America. I regret the present drifting apart of 
psychological theory and philosophy as harmful to both. There is, 
of course, a multitude of experimental problems which require 
division of labor; but, when psychology becomes entirely a 
trafficking with physiological reactions and regards the higher and 
more complex conscious activities of man as not a legitimate sub- 
ject of systematic inquiry by any other means than observations 
with physiological instruments on animal and human bodies, there 
is all the more need, with this impoverishment of psychology, that 



298 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

philosophers should cultivate psychology as Wundt, for an illus- 
trious example, did in his great work on Folk Psychology.™ 

I may add that the "Psychology of Act" of Brentano and his 
followers, among whom would be numbered, in varying measure, 
all the aforementioned German writers, obviously has very close 
affinities with the American and English "self-psychology." 

Psychology may be regarded as a transitional science, one 
which occupies a middle ground between the natural and the 
humanistic or cultural sciences. Its roots are in biology, its 
branches are the empirical social sciences, such as the psychology 
of ethics and sociology ; and it culminates in philosophy. In social 
psychology and in the comparative psychology of the history of 
science, morality, art, and religion, we shall find important data 
and principles for a philosophy of personality. From these fields 
and from the three philosophical culture sciences or sciences of 
intrinsic values — namely, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of 
religion — we shall draw most of our data, since we are concerned 
with the self, not so much in the sense of a biological organism as, 
in the sense of a reflective thinker and agent who is socialized, 
moralized, and rationalized through participation in the social- 
historical life of culture. 

In short, if psychology be regarded as a purely natural causal 
science, which is concerned only with the analysis and description 
of mental elements and complexes in their dependence on the 
nervous system, and which employs only the mechanical or physical 
concepts of relation, causation and function, it cannot be regarded 
as the chief, much less the sole, basis of the philosophical sciences. 
If psychology be regarded as primarily the systematic study of 
conscious and purposive individuals, it is the chief basis of philos- 
ophy and the humanistic sciences. It is the latter sort of psychol- 
ogy which principally interests us and a good part of the present 
volume might be classified as a psychology of conscious indi- 
viduality. 

10 A good deal of valuable work has been done in America in "Social 
Psychology' ' and "Psychology of Religion.' ' 



CHAPTER XXIII 



In what sense, if any, can we say that the empirical individual 
or personality implies a unique principle, which is one and con- 
tinuous throughout the diversities and succession of the indi- 
vidual's empirical history? This is the vexatious problem of 
personal identity. It is the most central and weighty of all meta- 
physical problems, inasmuch as upon its solution, however tenta- 
tive, depends one's attitude towards all metaphysical and axio- 
logical questions — towards the problems of human freedom, of the 
value and destiny of the individual, of the true ends and values of 
the social order and of education and culture, and finally of the 
meaning and value of the cosmical order. Hence the investigation 
of the problem of personal identity is a matter of the utmost prac- 
tical consequences. For, as Bishop Berkeley said, "Whatever the 
world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the 
human mind, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a 
thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot 
and a sorry statesman." To which I add that, from our empirical 
standpoint, meditation upon the human mind is the prerequisite 
of meditation upon God and the summum bonum; or, if you prefer 
abstruse language, upon true values and their cosmic status. 

Moral judgment and action, the administration of society and 
all education proceed upon the covert assumption that the normal 
individual is a self-active and responsible social unit. But this 
assumption is challenged by biologists, psychologists and sociolo- 
gists, as well as by many philosophers, on the ground that it is a 
naive popular misconception which is dissipated into the void by 
the analysis of human personality. The latter becomes, under the 
scientific searchlight, an ever shifting mosaic of biological impul- 

1 This chapter and Chapter 28 are expansions of an article ■ ' The Psy- 
chological Self and the Actual Personality," in The Philosophical Review, 
Vol. xiv, No. 6. November 1905, pp. 669-683. 

299 



300 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

sions and appetites, of neuro-muscular habit automatisms inter- 
mittently lighted up by sporadic flashes of sentience, of sensations, 
feelings and emotions, and of images and ideas, which are all by- 
products of nerve processes and are illusorily believed to be efficient 
factors in the life of the self. From this standpoint personality is 
the changing and passive product of the interaction between the 
physical organism and its environment. I have already argued at 
sufficient length against the reduction of the mind to a physical 
organism or machine. It now remains to inquire what grounds 
there are for the belief in a mental or spiritual principle of personal 
identity. 

The belief in question is challenged chiefly on two kinds of 
grounds: (1) a rigorous inspection of the facts of consciousness 
does not bring to light any datum corresponding to the so-called 
mental self; (2) the many facts of both normal and abnormal 
character support the view that the conscious life of the self con- 
sists of mere bubbles and surface currents which are produced by 
physiological processes in the subterranean depths of the uncon- 
scious. In the present and following chapters I shall examine in 
order the above two types of consideration. 

The naturalistic rejecter of the self argues as follows: 
Psychological analysis shows the conscious self to be complex and 
ever changing. The analyst never succeeds in tracking that mys- 
terious entity, the self-identical self, to its lair. It forever escapes 
him, and he is therefore ever disposed to regard it as nonexistent. 
What he finds in consciousness is an ever changing variety of 
mental elements living in changing relations. The mental ele- 
ments may be reduced to two fundamental types — sensations or 
sensa (Hume's "Sense Impressions") which are the raw materials 
of knowledge; and feeling impulses or affections, which are the 
raw materials of emotions, sentiments and acts of will. Each 
element has its own unique quality; and the elements vary in 
intensity or degree and in duration. Sensations vary in clearness 
and distinctness; affections vary in degrees of pleasantness and 
unpleasantness. In the actual mental life the sensory elements of 
consciousness are fused together to form percepts, and, by retention 
and reproduction, images. Erom percepts and images arise, by 
repeated association and fusion, the vaguer and more generic 
images called general ideas or concepts. The affective mental 
elements are fused together into more complicated and abstract 



THE NATURE OF THE SELF 301 

forms, thus giving rise to emotional disposition or sentiments from 
which arise volitions. In the actual mental life, of course, the 
sensational and affective elements are interwoven at every stage 
in their development;' they are distinguishable but not separable 
aspects of the organism's awareness. 

The feeling of selfhood is a fusion of internal sensations from 
the vital organs — chiefly from the visceral, thoracic and cephalic 
organs — sensations of respiration, pulse beat, massive sensations in 
the stomach, strain of the eye muscles and other head muscles ; all 
accompanied by feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness. 
William James put the matter neatly when he said, "The 'I think' 
which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects is the 
'I breathe' which actually does accompany them. . . . Breath, 
which was ever the original of 'spirit/ breath moving outward be- 
tween the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence 
out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to 
them as consciousness." 2 But James assumes philosophers able to 
construct entities. To take such observations as abolishing the 
validity in the belief in a self one ought to explain how the breath 
comes to say "I breathe," and thus to construct a theory of itself. 
For the breath suddenly to catch its breath and say Eespiro ergo 
sum, if there is really no thinking self, is no whit less mysterious 
than for a philosopher to say, Cogito ergo sum. In fact it is the 
same proposition — in other words breath or blood or visceral 
pressure or head strain suddenly turning from a physicochemical 
process into a philosopher is a stupendous miracle. Verily, 
psychologists are facile at cheating themselves and the public with 
words. 

In a similar fashion deliberate volition is resolved into a 
blindly determined complex or fusion of elemental instincts, emo- 
tions and desires, with percepts and images arising in the same 
fashion. The process of willing, even in the case of prolonged 
deliberation and so-called rational choice, is resolved into a com- 
plex feeling of instability or uneasiness due to the conflict of the 
emotional dispositions. When this conflict issues finally in the 
decision, "I will do this because it is my duty," this conscious 
decision is but the illusory by-product of the final stage of the 
emotional conflict. It is not explained why an emotional complex 



2 William James' Essays m Eadical Empiricism, p. 37. 



302 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

should thus give rise miraculously to the conscious illusion "I 
will," 

The rejection of the self, because of failure to find it in an 
introspective analysis of consciousness, has never been more clearly 
or forcibly put than by Hume. "I desire those philosophers who 
pretend that we have an idea of the substance of our minds to 
point out the impression that produces it, and tell distinctly after 
what manner that impression operates, and from what object it 
is derived." 3 "There are some philosophers who imagine we are 
at every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self: 
that we feel its existence, and its continuance in existence: and 
are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its 
perfect identity and simplicity. For my part, when I enter most 
intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some par- 
ticular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or 
hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time with- 
out a perception and can never observe anything but the percep- 
tion. But, setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may 
venture to affirm of the rest of mankind that they are nothing but 
a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each 
other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux 
and movement." 4 Psychology has made much progress since 
Hume's day: nevertheless the above passages state clearly what 
must, by the nature of the case, be the result of the attempt to 
reduce the "passing moment" in the living process of consciousness 
to particular elements and their connections. Mental life is, 
when regarded as the empirical continuum of selfhood, indeed in 
"perpetual flux and movement"; and the attempt to analyze a 
cross-section of it is rendered successful chiefly through the power 
of retrospection or memory. We cannot be a certain phase of 
conscious process and pulverize it at the same instant. When we 
introspectively examine and analyze mental processes we are not 
catching the self in the full tide of its life. Atomistic analysis of 
the structure of consciousness necessarily involves neglect of the 
immediately experienced and fluid continuity of consciousness. 
For this analysis transforms the actual unity into artificial and 
inert elements. This type of psychological analysis does not find 



•Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Book i, Part iv, Section 5. 
4 Ibid. Book i, Part iv, Section 6. 



THE NATURE OF THE SELF 303 

the self, since it so completely transforms the actual movement of 
consciousness that there is no place for a self in its artificial 
mosaic of elements. The real self cannot be one particular element 
among the other elements. It cannot be a mere constituent of 
itself. The whole cannot be a part of itself. Every attempt to 
objectify it in this fashion must fail. One can thus obtain, at 
best, only a dead remnant of the self, an object-me never the 
subject I. Every step in the analysis of consciousness into a com- 
plex of elements presupposes, however, the self to which the ele- 
ments belong and which performs the analysis; but which itself 
eludes envisagement as a particular psychical element. The self 
is the seer which, unseen, sees. Psychological analysis is a post- 
mortem affair ', but the self is always present at the inquest. It is 
at once corpse, coroner and jury. Naturally, then, the self is not 
found in this way. What are found are fragments of the actual 
ego, torn from their dynamic context in the process of living 
experience ; phases or moments in the life of the real ego precipi- 
tated from the living pulse of consciousness. 

When I become self-conscious, for example, at the present 
moment and analyze this pulse of consciousness, after the manner 
of atomistic psychology, I find a vague mass of organic sensations 
and sensations from my clothes as the general background, a visual 
perception of part of my body filled out by an image of parts of 
my body which I do not see, the kinesthetic sensations involved in 
writing, a feeling of tension in my forehead, and the idea of the 
personal pronoun "I." What is left out in this analysis is the 
immediate feeling of selfhood, without which I could not recognize 
any of these elements as belonging to me. The organic sensations 
are not conscious of themselves as being the self. Not even the 
strain sensations in the head or the idea of the personal pronoun 
"I" can be said to be the self which recognizes these elements as 
constituents of its momentary complex process. This is the very 
principle which sustains, directs, and renders intelligible all 
analysis of conscious processes. It is the immediate feeling of 
selfhood. 

It has been asserted that it is a paradoxical and contradictory 
assumption to say that a subject can be its own object, a self its 
own not-self. The self, in so-called introspection, must split up 
into two distinct things, the self observing and the self observed. 
But the observed self is no longer self, and thus there is found in 



304 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

experience no self at all, but only a series of feelings. If one 
admit the force of this objection, then so-called introspection can 
consist only in one conscions element knowing another conscious 
element. Consciousness is thus resolved into a series of elements, 
any one of which may know any other. An element of consciousness 
A may know another element B, and in turn be known as know- 
ing B by a third element C, and so forth. The only unity is what 
William James has called the "unity of the passing thought." He 
says that we need no other knower than this. 5 But to say that 
any element in a series knows another element in that series is to 
attribute to the element which knows the other element precisely 
the unity of consciousness which is mecmt by a psychical self. 
The unity of the passing thought carries in itself the very unity of 
the subject, which it is supposed empirically to supplant. A 
series of feelings which is aware of itself as a series is just what 
I mean by a self. 

It is no doubt difficult to observe introspectively one's own 
state of mind, when one is engrossed in an object or overmastered 
by a strong emotion. Nevertheless one is able to recognize at least 
that these experiences are one's own, and, to this extent, be con- 
scious of being conscious. Immediately one feels one's experiences 
as one's own, immediately one becomes aware of the primal fact 
of self-feeling, one becomes self-conscious. 

I have said that introspection is almost entirely retrospection. 
But, then, retrospection is introspection; the memory-content is 
one's own. To catch the fleeing moment on the wing is to arrest 
its flight; but one recognizes the arrested moment as one's own 
and can describe it as such. There are great differences of indi- 
vidual capacity for self -observation. The average man is not 
usually introspective, and many psychologists are not in this 
respect gifted above the average. The power of introspection, 
however, can be cultivated. The ability to describe their own 
mental processes seems to belong peculiarly to mystics and 
ecstatics, who have given us very vivid descriptions of their own 



8 James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, pp. 338 ff. No student should 
fail to study closely this, the greatest work of descriptive psychology in the 
English language; especially Chapter 9, "The Stream of Thought, " and 
Chapter 10, "The Consciousness of Self." Since I shall frequently criticize 
James I wish to say now that I owe as much to him as to any other modern 
writer. 



■ 

THE NATURE OF THE SELF 305 

exalted conditions. 6 Such are also psychasthenics like Maine de 
Biran and Amiel. There are many degrees of self-observation. 
In general, self-observation is clearest when it is involuntary. The 
deliberate effort to observe one's own state of consciousness usually 
results in partial failure. And of course accuracy in the descrip- 
tion thereof depends on accuracy of memory for subjective con- 
ditions. Here too, there are striking individual differences. 

One may call it a paradox, and doubtless it is one of the irre- 
ducible paradoxes of experience, that one can in the same instant 
and in the same psychical complex be subject and object, I and 
me. It is none the less a fact. Instead of allowing misconceptions 
of the self drawn from physical metaphors to blind one to the fact, 
one who wishes to do justice to the uniqueness of selves in the 
system of experience will begin with this fact. Consciousness is 
much more complex, variable, and elusive in its contents and 
movements than any kind of physical object. Consequently, self- 
observation is more difficult than observation of physical things. 
This is not a sufficient reason for ignoring or denying the fact that 
a self can know itself immediately, or for asserting that the self 
which knows is in no degree identical with the self which is known. 
They are distinct but not separate. 

While the self has immediate self-knowledge in feeling it is 
true that the self that is known cannot be the whole self to which 
belong the feelings, thoughts and will attributes. The self as 
known is distinct from the self as knower and is but a fragmentary 
expression of the whole self. The self knows directly but a passing 
phase of itself. On the basis of introspection alone one would 
not be justified in asserting that all processes of conscious life 
must belong to one unitary self or person which is their bearer or 
substrate. Not only do sensationalistic "impressionists," such 
as Hume, Mach and a crowd of others, deny the need of assuming 
a real ego; but even Wundt and many other psychologists reject 
the notion of a soul-substance or substrate of conscious life in favor 
of the actuality theory. According to the latter, the self is simply 
the actuality of conscious process. But does not this view logically 



*Cf. the Confessions of St. Augustine, Kousseau's Autobiography, 
Goethe's Wahrheit und Dichtung, and the quotations from the writings of 
religious mystics and eestatics in James' The Varieties of Eeligious Experi- 
ence and in Evelyn Underbill's Mysticism. See also K. Oesterreieh, Die 
Phdnomenologie des Ich in ihren Grundproblemen, Band I, Leipzig, 1910, es- 
pecially Chap. 9, "Das Problem der Selbstwahrnehumung." 



306 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

reduce the unity of the self to the passing moment ? What hecomes 
of all the psychical capacities that are not functioning in the pres- 
ent passing moment of the individual's consciousness? Do these 
capacities persist simply as the modifications of nerve structures ? 
I shall discuss the latter question more fully in connection with 
the mind-body problem. Here I am concerned with the more 
general question — have we good grounds for inferring, from the 
facts of individual experience, that there may be a continuing 
psychical or psychophysical entity — not a passive, blocklike sub- 
stance (the travesty of the "soul" or "self" doctrine set up by its 
critics) but the enduring active principle or living substrate of the 
passing moments of feelings, thoughts, choices, volitions ? I think 
we have a good right to do so. I am so old-fashioned that I believe 
in the soul and am not frightened by the word "substrate." My 
reasons for the belief are as follows: (1) The indubitable facts of 
the consciousness of continuing identity, of the unity and con- 
tinuity of the indivi dual's experience. (2) The sense of initiative 
and responsibility. (3) The results of the activities of persons in 
building up, altering and rebuilding the structures of human 
civilization — material, social, scientific. 

1. (a) The experiential unity of conscious life at every 
moment is a fact, though one's attention may not be directed to 
it; but, just as now I am not attending to some constituents of 
my present experience which are yet recognized to be parts of it 
as soon as I attend to them, so I cannot escape the recognition 
that all that I experience now constitutes one pulse of my experi- 
ence. So far from the complexity, or even the distractedness, of 
my present pulse being evidence against this unity, they are evi- 
dences for it. I may say that I cannot completely harmonize my 
present conflicting attitudes of mind but, in so doing, I recognize 
that they are all mine. I may say that I am distracted by the 
complexity and incompatibilities of my present ideas and infer- 
ences but, in so doing, I imply that I own them all. Even an 
extremely disordered self, a divided self, a so-called multiple or 
alternating "personality," implies the unity of the self amidst all 
its aberrations. 

(b) The continuity of the self, the sense of continuous self- 
identity, involves the persistence of something that is continuously 
one through change. I remember that I was present last night at 
a reception and that I said and heard such and such things. I 






THE NATURE OF THE SELF 307 

can compare the differences between my attitudes then and now. 
I can discuss with my friend what was said and done. The events 
of last night are past. They do not exist in the present, but they 
are psychically real in the sense that they did exist and that they 
are remembered. Memory is a reality, and it does not consist in 
the complete re-creation of what then happened. This cannot be, 
for my present is not and cannot be the same as my past state. My 
ability to recall, identify and date, what then happened, implies 
recognition of similarity-in-difference. How could I remember 
what has ceased to be as an actual experience, how could I ever 
reproduce in a different temporal-spatial setting what I experi- 
enced then, unless I were in some manner the same self? If I 
were nothing but the passing moment how could I compare the 
past and the future with the present passing moment? For 
expectation, no less than memory, involves the actual continuity of 
the self. If I were nothing but a passing thought I could never 
recognize the passage of moments nor find any meaning in saying 
that I am only a passing thought. 

Mere association of ideas will not account for memory. My 
present ideas of last night's events are* new events. They are not 
contiguous with the latter in space and time. My recollections 
of last night are as much new events in my mental history as are 
my perceptual recognitions of old family scenes into which I 
enter anew when I return to my boyhood home. There can be no 
memory which is not based on the recognition of similarity. 
There can be no recognition of similarity without recognition of 
difference in experiences. For similarity is not partial identity 
of existence. Recognition of similarity presupposes recognition 
of difference or diversity. In turn, in order to recognize diversity 
of existence, I must have lived through these diversities and have 
noted their similarities through their differences, or vice versa. 
To attempt to explain memory by the passive association of ideas 
is to presuppose, in these associations, precisely what is to be 
explained by them. It is to beg the whole question of personal 
identity. 

What I have said in regard to a simple case of memory applies, 
with even more force, to the persistence and activation of powers 
or capacities developed in the past but not active now. Expectant 
and purposive attitudes are grounded on memory and habit, inter- 
woven with native and modified desire and interest. These factors, 



308 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

in turn, imply the continuity of psychophysical dispositions. The 
actual self is a more or less organized complex of psychophysical 
dispositions. My ego includes now a considerable number of atti- 
tudes or incipient acts that are the results of native dispositions 
modified by the interaction of my original capacities with environ- 
mental conditions. My ego is the living record of my history 
since conception. Many of these dispositions are not present in 
my clear consciousness ; but they are not inert or inactive. They 
are subconscious factors which may come into the field of clear 
consciousness at any moment. The ego is a complex unity which 
involves many subconscious factors. 7 If we take the word "thinks" 
in a sufficiently broad sense to jnclude all activities of a mind, a 
self, then Descartes was right in saying "The soul always thinks." 
A lifelong study of dream life has convinced me that the activity 
of the mind never ceases, even in the deepest sleep. Subconscious- 
ness, in natural or artificial sleep, is sub-attentive consciousness. 

Thus far, I have argued for the self as the unitary and contin- 
uous ground, or owner, which is identical with the continuous 
complex and varying attitudes of the mind, when these are taken 
as a whole. I do not mean that the real self is something which 
lies behind or underneath the actual processes of conscious life, like 
the machine which projects the moving picture, or like a room 
which contains a variety of articles. I do mean that the process 
factors of selfhood have no reality apart from the whole and con- 
tinuing ego, and, equally, that the ego has no reality apart from 
the continuously and varyingly active factors which are the ego in 
its concreteness. The actuality theory of the ego is the true theory, 
if it be admitted that its actuality includes many persistent factors 
that may be at any moment only virtually conscious. The ego is 
the living and pulsating unity, not the mechanical sum, of its 
dynamic elements. 

2. The hypothesis that the self or ego is a real cause is the 
most natural explanation of the sense of initiative and responsi- 
bility, the feeling of self-determination, and of the whole life 
of seeking, of choice and purposiveness ; which characterize the 
normal individual. It is sheer dogmatism, not openminded em- 
piricism, to say either that the only efficient factors in our world 
are purely mechanical and physical ; or that, since all. change must 



For further discussion Cf. Chaps. 25, 26 and 27. 



THE NATURE OF THE SELF 309 

be the effect solely of the rearrangement of spatial elements, there- 
fore the ego cannot be a cause. The kind of change which occurs 
when a human self makes a critical choice differs fundamentally 
from the kind of change which occurs when the breeze scatters a 
pile of ashes. To say that a self is a cause is not to imply that it 
acts capriciously, but only that the self is an original or unique 
determining factor in a process that is, therefore, unique in kind. 

3. That selves are unitary and continuous realities and are 
unique causal factors is the most reasonable explanation of the 
whole work of human civilization. If we consider the develop- 
ment and the mutations of cultures, the beginnings, growth and 
transformation of cultures, of social and political systems, of lan- 
guages, literatures and arts, of morals and religion and of science 
and philosophy, we cannot really account for these novel and vigor- 
ous eruptions in the order of physical nature except as effects of 
the striving of real selves for self-maintenance, self-expression, 
self -development. 

The self, treated as an object given for inspection, appears to 
take on a spatial and bodily character, and the easiest way to 
explain its contents is in terms of bodily sensations and affections 
with their conditioning nerve-processes. In this respect analytical 
psychology carries forward, in a more rigorous fashion, a pro- 
cedure which begins in common-sense thinking. The consideration 
of the contents of past experience by one innocent of psychological 
training involves the quasi-materialization of the self. For the 
item of past experience is looked upon as a fixed and persistently 
existing fact. Past ideas are regarded as packed away somehow 
in the storeroom of the mind. This assumption that ideas are like 
physical things or elements is the fundamental error of associa- 
tionist psychology. Now, in so far as the self is identified with a 
collection of past and present sensations, affections and images, or 
"ideas" it is regarded as a quasi-material thing, a "bundle of 
impressions." The atomistic psychology of to-day does not regard 
the contents of conscious as static entities. It does, how- 
ever, regard them as dependent elements, whose permanent sub- 
structures or bases are nerve-paths. Its position in regard to the 
self is a translation of Hume's psychological atomism into terms 
of neural structure and activity. Hume's conclusion in regard 
to the nonexistence of the self was a logical deduction from his 
starting point. But he looked for the self in the wrong place and 



310 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

in the wrong way. Contemporary psychologists who, not finding 
the self as a permanent core or center of sensations and images, 
assert that it does not exist, except as a system of association paths 
among the cortical neurones, are, like Hume, looking for the self 
in the wrong way and consequently do not find it in the right place. 

The actual self lives in attitudes, or active and appreciative 
relations to objects. It is an active principle that thinks and thus 
affirms or denies in logical judgment ; that chooses and thus selects 
and avoids in willing; that feels and thus loves and hates, joys 
and sorrows. Alike in judging, in doing, and in feeling, the self 
functions as a dynamic center, an active source of judgment, valua- 
tion and purpose. It is not a changeless substance which under- 
lies the concrete and changing contents of the empirical life, but 
a living active unity which has and knows these contents as its 
own. "States of consciousness," so-called, are not directly known 
as contents isolated from the relation of the self to its world, and 
they do not exist as such. Sensations, percepts, images, concepts, 
interposed by the philosopher or psychologist between the self and 
its world of objects, are artificial products, results of retrospective 
analysis obtained by abstraction from the actual relations between 
the self and its world. What is directly known is a psychophysical 
individual, in active and passive relations with a world of objects; 
in other words the self as knower perceiving concrete things, think- 
ing concrete objects and their relations; the self as doer and 
sufferer, feeling, valuing, and striving to alter objects or its own 
relations to them. Of course, I include under "objects" here the 
field of other selves. 

In the actual movement of life the self is as immediate and 
real as the objects of its judgment, valuation and action. I have 
maintained that the immediate feeling of selfhood is involved in 
all analysis of consciousness, since consciousness is always indi- 
viduated. The "concept" of the self, in distinction from the imme- 
diate feeling thereof, must be framed in the light of all the aspects 
and relationships of the individual. I wish, in conclusion, to 
insist that the concept of the self is at least as necessary a factor 
in thinking out the meaning of experience in its totality as is the 
concept of the world regarded as the totality of all physical 
processes and their relations. 

The fact that the self is a complex does not invalidate either 
its unity or its reality. If it is a specific kind of complex, a com- 



THE NATURE OF THE SELF 311 

plex which functions as a whole in knowing and willing, in organ- 
izing its experiences and realizing values, it is a unique kind of 
reality. Any datum which shows, upon the closest inspection, 
specificity of function must be admitted to be an elemental con- 
stituent of reality. Such data are minds. 

Again, the fact that a self or mind appears and operates only 
in association with a certain physicochemical complex, which is 
therefore the condition of its functioning, in no way destroys its 
unique reality. Let us admit that a specific chemical combination 
of physical elements is one indispensable condition (a scientific 
cause) of the self's functioning. Then the whole psychophysical 
self is in part the result of mechanical processes, but it is not 
merely mechanical; and a world in which selves appear and 
operate is not a purely mechanical world. For it is an elemental 
fact that the specific mentality of the self is correlated with a 
correspondingly specific physicochemical complex. Selves in their 
wholeness are irreducible factors in a process which is not at all 
the same kind of process that would have occurred had there been 
no selves. 

Any attempt to formulate the nature and meaning of the world 
process which leaves the unique mentality of selfhood out of ac- 
count omits the most significant datum of experience. To say that 
selves have originated as a result merely of certain very complex 
physical processes is to beg the question. The "real" world process 
is one which has taken the direction of personalization, which has 
resulted in beings that are 'prima facie agents in the further modi- 
fication of the process itself. Therefore, the world process is 
inexpugnably qualified by, and must be read in the light of, the 
emergence and energizing in it of intelligent value-creating agents. 

Summing up this discussion, a self is an organized complex 
of physiological energies operating through a determinate mechan- 
ism and illuminated by a sentient consciousness which rises, 
through its functions of recognitive and selective memory, selective 
analysis and synthesis of elements of its experience, to the point of 
exercising a considerable measure of control in the valuation, direc- 
tion, and organization of its own native tendencies as well as of its 
environment. The physiological energies and the sensory-impul- 
sive materials of valuation and choice are the complex resultants 
of heredity and variation in the organism. Biologically, the self 
is a center of individuation for congenital tendencies or disposi- 



312 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

tions which run back into the remote and undeciphered past of 
the race, a meeting point wherein these converging tendencies give 
rise to fresh variations. 8 But, without the selective analytic and 
synthetic principle revealed in conscious activity, the biological 
individual would not be a true self. 

Culturally, the self is the product of the reaction of the con- 
scious organism above described to the environmental factors of 
civilization — to language, social and political systems, manners, arts 
and sciences, and religions. The ordinary individual is for the most 
part passive in his reactions. He modifies inherited culture systems 
only in slight degree. The superordinary individual, the leader, 
the thinker, the genius, recreates these social culture systems. 
The self is thus, for the most part, the product of his somatic and 
especially his cerebral inheritance, plus his actual physical en- 
vironment, plus his social heritage and atmosphere. The modicum 
of originality and self-determination in most selves is small. But 
the synthetic spiritual principle is there and operates, and in some 
few persons it rises to signal creativity. Even the humblest person 
has his own unique flavor of personality. We are not here discuss- 
ing the problem of freedom of the will, but it is evident that such 
freedom is limited in range and rather rare in its expression, if it 
takes place at all. It is at best a power of choice that can be 
exercised only among a very limited number of determinate pos- 
sibilities, and it is not obvious that, thus far, our theory of the self 
logically involves the admission of any indeterminism in the self. 
It may be that the activities and possibilities of the spiritual prin- 
ciple are just as specifically determined by its "original nature," 
plus physical and social milieus, as are the mechanical activities 
of the body. 

APPENDIX 



In his chapters on "The Meanings of Self," and "The Reality of 
Self" in Appearance and Reality (Chapters 9 and 10), Mr. Bradley, 
after an acute discussion of the various senses of the term "self," 
concludes that the foundation of the self is the inner and changing 
core of feeling resting mainly on what is called Ccenesthesia ; but this 

8 The biological elements of the self may be called Mendelian unit-char- 
acters. 



THE NATURE OF THE SELF 313 

core of feeling is dependent on the not-self and the boundaries be- 
tween self-feeling and the not-self are constantly shifting. There 
are, however, he thinks, elements in the self which never are not- 
self ; "elements in the central self -core which are never made objects, 
and which practically cannot be" (p. 23 of the first edition). "Selves 
exist and are identical in some sense" (p. 104) ; the unity of feeling 
never disappears (p. 110). We may reflect upon the unity of feeling 
and say that the self as self and as not-self all in one is our object, 
but the actual subject is never brought before itself as an object and 
hence the subject as it is can never be perceived (p. 111). The so- 
called experience of self -activity, if taken to be a revelation of the 
nature of the self, is fraudulent (p. 116). The monadic theory of 
the self is useless, since, if we admit that the monadic selves are in 
relation their independent reality is ruined ; and if we deny that they 
are in relations and at the same time assert that there is more than 
one monad we have contradicted ourselves, since even plurality and 
separateness are relations. Moreover, without relations the monad 
is useless, since it is in no relation to the actual process of self-feel- 
ing; if it is in relation to the latter it is no longer a monad. Mr. 
Bradley concludes that the self, although the highest form of ex- 
perience which we have, is not a true form since it gives us only 
appearances ; like all other forms of finite existence it carries us away 
into a maze of terms and relations (pp. 119, 120). 

Mr. Bradley is right in his contentions — (1) that the whole self 
can never be object for itself and that there is always an unanalyzable 
remainder of self -feeling ; (2) that the self exists only in relations; 
(3) that the theory of the self as a changeless self -identical monad 
is a fictitious monster; (4) that the notion of the self is a reflective 
construction. But, when Mr. Bradley substitutes for the self, or 
better for a community of selves, the notion of an absolutely harmoni- 
ous timeless experience which no experient has, as the Absolute, he is 
foisting upon us a more fictitious monster. Experience is a construct 
made by abstraction from experients. What can a perfect all-inclus- 
ive, timeless experience mean? I cannot see that the reality of my 
selfhood is invalidated by my inability ever to make my whole self 
an object of perception, any more than I can see that my inability 
to perceive now more than a part of my study and a fragment of the 
street makes the external world unreal. As to activity I can find no 
item of experience that more successfully resists a dissolving analysis 
than the activity of purposive thinking. Feelings of muscular effort 
may be resoluble into peripheral sensations, but not purposive think- 
ing. Moreover, just as the reality of physical energy is legitimately 
inferred from physical work done, so the reality of mental energy 



314 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

is legitimately inferred from mental work done. If Mr. Bradley is 
not a self -active thinker how are we to account for his very important 
works? For me the self is a dynamic reality living in relations. 
Personal identity is variable both in extent and intent, but that per- 
sonal identity exists at all evidences the active reality of a self which 
is continuous and is a power of synthesis realizing itself in the actual 
history of the empirical "me" 



CHAPTEE XXIV 

CONSCIOUSNESS 

Strictly speaking, consciousness cannot be defined, since it is 
an ultimate or irreducible quality of experience, as belonging to 
individuals, and hence, cannot be stated in terms of anything other 
than itself. In order to know consciousness one must be capable 
of self-consciousness, just as in order to know light or color one 
must be able to reflect upon what one sees as well as to see. It 
is possible, however, to describe consciousness quite accurately by 
certain notes or marks. 

In discussing the nature of consciousness it must be borne in 
mind that there is no such thing as consciousness in general. Con- 
sciousness is the property of an individual organism. Moreover, 
to be conscious is to experience something. This chapter might 
have been entitled a the nature of experience." I use the terms 
consciousness and experience as equivalent. I proceed to state the 
notes of consciousness or experience. 

1. Consciousness is awareness and always of something more 
or less determinate. 2. In man, consciousness includes the possi- 
bility of being aware of awareness — self-consciousness. 3. Con- 
sciousness has degrees of clearness or vividness. It varies in 
intensity. 4. It has duration or temporal order. 5. It has degrees 
of expansiveness or inclusiveness. 6. It includes feelings or 
affects which are reactions of the subject to stimuli. Feeling 
impulses express what the self is dynamically. To be a self is 
primarily to feel and act. 7. Thus consciousness involves interest, 
desire, valuation, preference and choice. 8. Thus consciousness 
is dynamic. The nature of the conscious self, as the striving 
towards harmony and continuity of life, is constituted by the 
organization, into trains of purposive activity, of its central and 
abiding interests, values or selective preferences. 



315 



316 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

I. The Unity of Consciousness 

The conscious self is a complex unity, a system of systems, a 
moving complex made up of many lesser complexes or clusters of 
impulses, images, ideas and purposes. A self always consists of 
many partial selves, and the degree in which these partial selves 
are integrated into one harmonious whole varies. Actually every 
self is a quasi-society, more or less harmonious, of partial selves. 
Selves consist of partial selves and the individual self consists of 
the total relations between bits of selfhood. With the details of 
this problem we shall deal more fully later. What sort of complex 
unity is then a conscious self ? It is a dynamic unity, one which 
has its being only in process, in unifying. But so is a material 
machine as a going concern. Still more emphatically so is a 
biological organism. What are the differences between machines, 
organisms and conscious selves? 

a. The unity of a machine in operation consists of the ex- 
ternal action upon one another of parts juxtaposed in space. It 
is true that, through friction, the actions of the parts modify one 
another. The wearing down by friction consists in the disintegra- 
tion of parts into looser aggregates of particles that were only in 
lesser degree external to one another than the parts which they 
made up. There are governing parts in a mechanical system, 
springs in a watch, for instance, but their action, too, is relatively 
external to one another. 

b. In a living organism we have a type of system or complex 
intermediate between a machine and a conscious self. The life 
of the organism seems to pulsate through all the parts and each 
part to contribute, by its functioning, to the life of the whole. The 
whole pervades all the parts and each part exists as such only in 
the whole. The living organism cannot be assembled and taken 
apart like an automobile. Each organ is a complex which, in 
turn, is an element in the organic complex of the whole. So it has 
been customary to describe the unity of self-conscious individuality 
as an organic system. But the analogy is not complete. Parts and 
by-products of the living organism, such as nails, mucus, hair, 
are constantly being transformed into more or less mechanical 
aggregates and cast off. Single organs may be removed without 
apparently seriously affecting the life of the whole. The organism 
is a self -repairing machine, and where it cannot restore a lost part 






CONSCIOUSNESS 317 

another part may take over the function of the lost organ. On 
the other hand, in the conscious self the unity completely inter- 
penetrates the parts, and the parts are not parts in a mechanical 
sense, since they interpenetrate one another in a transpatial sys- 
tem. There are no elements in consciousness except as distinguish- 
able aspects of the single unitary pulse of individual experience. 
Thus the uniquely systematic character of consciousness is revealed 
as completely pervading and living in all its aspects. Whatever 
may be the degree in which consciousness may be continuous in 
time at any moment, the unity of consciousness is one and inde- 
feasible, a system living in and through its elementary and partial 
systems. Thus a mental or spiritual unifying process is sui 
generis; all other forms of unity and individuality are more or 
less external in comparison with it. Consciousness is both syn- 
thetic and analytic. In any single phase or moment of its life, 
one or another of its features may predominate, but never to the 
total exclusion of the others. 

II. Consciousness and Its Objects 

In book I we considered the relation between thought and its 
objects. So I shall only briefly indicate it here. The objects of 
awareness may be: sense qualities in the physical world; one's 
own feelings and practical ends ; or abstract principles as in logic, 
mathematics, metaphysics. In every case awareness is deter- 
minate. It is of something specific. 

Our further conception of consciousness is to be reached in 
terms of its relationships. I have said that consciousness is a 
unique property of experience as individuated. In the broadest 
sense of this very vague term "experience," all content of experi- 
ence is present to conscious subjects and, hence, involves con- 
sciousness. My experience of the pencil, the paper, or the desk, 
is at least a fact of my consciousness, whatever else it may be. But 
the pencil, the paper, or the desk, are not in my consciousness in 
the same sense in which they are in actual space. They are present 
to my consciousness in that relation which constitutes them objects 
of my individual awareness, To have identified this relation of 
awareness with the general concept of immediate existence, and 
to have argued from this identification that, since everything 
known is present to a consciousness, therefore everything existent 



318 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

is content or matter of consciousness, has been the fallacy of 
psychological idealism. The habit of speaking of everything that 
one is conscious of as "content" has led to the fallacious notion of 
consciousness as a nonspatial container of spatial things. Follow 
this notion to its logical conclusion and everything disappears into 
one's head, and one's head in turn disappears into a dimensionless 
point. 

The desk exists for my consciousness now. This does not mean 
that the actual desk is nothing but a state of my being conscious. 
It does mean that, thus far, my being conscious depends on a rela- 
tion of my ego to the desk, which I believe to exist also when I am 
not conscious of it. Thus far, my consciousness is relational; it 
is the end term in a relation. 1 Thus far, to be an object of con- 
sciousness is to be in the relation of meaning. 2 In order that 
there may be consciousness there must be qualities and relations 
of objects, which may also exist independent of a subject's con- 
sciousness. But consciousness is a very unique or specific kind of 
end term in a relation. A single pulse of consciousness is depend- 
ent, for its actual constitution, on the awareness of the actual 
objects and relations which constitute its data. When I am con- 
scious of the desk, my concrete consciousness depends on the rela- 
tion of the desk to my ego. Consciousness is always a function 
of a self, and a self exists only in relation, just as an object in 
space, for instance, exists in relation to another spatial object. A 
self is a focalizing center of relationships. Whether I am con- 
scious of the spatial relations of objects, such as that of the desk 
to the paper, or of social relations such as that of myself to my son, 
or of logical relations such as equality, inequality, difference, 
identity, contradiction, consistency ; in every case there are three 
factors; namely (1) the specific objects or object of consciousness, 
which may be (a) particular facts either psychical or physical or 
(b) relations between particular facts such as causal, class and 
quantitative relations, or psychical values; (2) the unique relation 
in which the specific objects of consciousness stand to the individ- 
ual self who is conscious in these specific relations; and (3) the 
attitude of the self which can know itself in these relations. And 
it makes no essential difference in the situation whether the objects 

*F. J. E. Woodbridge, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and 
Scientific Methods, Vol. ii, pp. 119-127. 
2 Ibid. 



CONSCIOUSNESS 319 

of one's being conscious are physical objects or processes of one's 
own consciousness. In both cases the fundamental relation is the 
same — consciousness is the attitudinal relation of awareness of an 
ego to its objects which, therefore, need not be conscious. 3 This 
relation is not a causal relation nor one of reciprocal dependence 
of existence, hence the object may exist independent of the aware- 
ness by the ego. 

If there were nothing to be conscious of, I should not be con- 
scious. The converse proposition is not true. To convert "all 
consciousness is of objects and their relations" into "all objects 
and relations exist only when they are for consciousness" is to 
commit an elementary logical fallacy. 

There is a sense in which consciousness may be a neutral con- 
tinuum. When one is not reflecting upon what it means to have 
an experience, or upon the relation between himself as agent of 
experience and the surrounding world, his consciousness is a con- 
tinuum which seems to consist just of a mosaic of sense-data 
occupying a certain spatial field and moving through a certain 
temporal flux. A moment ago I sat looking out of my study 
window. My then consciousness, as I now recall it, consisted 
simply of a visual, auditory, tactual and olfactory field or totum 
sensibile. It contained the awareness of the window, fragments 
of the room, a bit of the street with vehicles passing along it, the 
raucous toots of motor horns, the noises of their engines and 
wheels, bits of the houses on the opposite side of the street, the 
odors of the street in spring, the incense ascending from my pipe. 
My consciousness seemed identical with the aggregate of objects 
in its field. It seemed nothing more than the compresence of this 
multitude of varied sensory objects. This is the realm of so-called 
"pure" or "neutral" experience. In this relation consciousness 
appears to add nothing to its objective field of contents but the 
colorless compresence of its parts to my awareness. "Pure experi- 
ence" is just the limiting case of a passive consciousness of all 
sorts of things in a spatio-temporal continuum. Consciousness 
seems to add nothing to, and to subtract nothing from, the things. 
Its goings and its comings appear to be of no moment to them. It 
seems to be an indefinitely extensible and flexible, nonresisting, 

■It follows that a feeling or thought is never conscious of itself. Self- 
consciousness is the awareness by the thinking self of some part of it own 
moving content. 



320 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

X 

colorless and translucent medium, through which all sorts of things 
pass and which changes with the passing of its contents. So far 
consciousness seems to be like a bit of pure space. 

But let me hear a scream of agony, feel a sudden pain, see a 
long lost friend crossing the street, or think of a pressing practical 
problem, and the whole situation is immediately altered. I 
straightway become a conscious agent, doer, sufferer, planner, 
thinker. The lights and shadows of my conscious content change. 
I alter the contents and pattern of my presentational continuum. 
In short I become actual as an attentive, feeling, conational self. 

If consciousness existed in general, apart from individuated 
centers, or if it passed through and around these as the daylight 
through and around objects, it might never seem more than a 
neutral continuum. But consciousness never really exists as a 
neutral and impersonal vessel or continuum. There is no such 
entity as consciousness. It is always a property of individual 
selves, who are at once, and all the time, both cognitive experients 
and affectional agents. As experients these agents are recipients 
of sensory presentations or percepts; as active or attentive selves 
they selectively analyze and reconstruct their presentations; and 
as affectional they desire, value, and strive voluntarily. 

I agree with James Ward that there are three distinct com- 
ponents of the psychical process — attention, feeling, and objects or 
presentations — constituting always one concrete mental process. 
A mind is an individuated experient which lives in two kinds of 
attitudes — (1) receptive and (2) active. In the receptive attitude 
the attentive consciousness is incited by external stimuli; that is, 
it is nonvoluntarily determined. In the active attitude attentive 
consciousness is determined by centrally originated feelings of 
which volition is a complex or highly elaborated form. Of course, 
these attitudes interplay in the most varied manner. Attention is 
a name for the cognitive activity of the conscious individual, by 
virtue of which, whether the activity be directed towards an object, 
through the self's internally initiated desires and valuations, or 
through the arousing impact of environmental stimuli, the 
presentation (percept) or representation (image and concept) of 
the object is increased in intensity and clearness. Attention is a 
specific form of self-activity whose differentia consists in the fact 
that by it cognition is enhanced and clarified. Attentive cognition, 
desire, and volition are all species of the genus self-activity. 



CONSCIOUSNESS 321 

James argued that experience is primarily "pure" or "neu- 
tral." 4 This pure experience is the stuff of which everything in 
the world is composed. Referring to the common distinction made 
between the physical and the psychical as two qualitatively dif- 
ferent fields, James says, "Experience has no such inner duplicity ; 
and the separation of it into consciousness and its content comes 
not by way of subtraction but by way of addition." 5 "The same 
bit of pure experience is viewed as a physical thing or a conscious 
process according to the relations in which it is taken. My pencil 
as a part of the system of external space relations is a thing ; as a 
part of the continuous flow of my imagery it is a conscious content. 
Personal histories are processes of change in time." 6 "A 'mind' 
or 'personal consciousness' is the name of a series of experiences 
run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality 
is a series of similar experiences knit by different transitions." 7 
Consciousness is thus a function of certain groupings of this pure 
experience. This function is simply the taking of certain bits of 
experience in certain relations. 

I agree with James to the extent that consciousness is a func- 
tion of the individual organism. And a conscious individual is a 
being-in-relation. It is correct to say that consciousness means 
concrete facts of experience taken in certain relations, with specific 
transitions, etc. But this is not the whole story. A thing-experi- 
ence is not precisely the same thing-experience in different rela- 
tions. Eelations are essential elements in the texture of thing- 
experiences. 

Consciousness is not an end term in a relation in the same sense 
in which a desk or an algebraic symbol is an end term, nor is 
consciousness a continuum like space. Consciousness is a function 
of individual centers of cognitive-volitional relationship and of 
related elements of experience; which stand, respectively, in the 
relation of being conscious of objects, and of being objects of 
consciousness. This may sound like a very pompous platitude; 
but it is nevertheless, I think, the statement of the ultimate situa- 
tion in regard to cognition. 8 

4 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism. 
s Ibid., p. 9. 
9 Ibid., p. 48. 
T Ibid., p. 80. 

• The cognitive relationships of consciousness or ' ' thought ' ' and its various 
of objects I have already discussed in Book i. 



322 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

Consciousness then is a function rather than an entity. But 
I would insist that it is a function or attitude of a unique kind of 
entity in unique relations; namely, a self or subject. Whatever 
be the specific character of the things, or relations, or things-in- 
relation, which constitute the immediate objects of one's being 
cognitively conscious, to such objects there must be added the 
uniqueness of the relation which consists in their being for a con- 
scious self, in order that justice may be done to the nature of 
experience. Experience without the self is like the tragedy of 
Hamlet without the Prince. 

What does the relating? What makes or sustains the transi- 
tions? Of what is consciousness, as thus described, a function? 
James's theory seeks to lay the ghosts of the dualisms of mind and 
body, of thought and physical things, of immanent experiencing 
subject and transcendent object, which have annoyed philosophers 
for centuries. But the theory has an artificial simplicity. The 
question bobs up once more, what makes the difference between 
those relations and transitions in experience which constitute a 
personal biography with a consciousness, and those which consti- 
tute the same bits of pure experience physical objects? Is it 
simply the difference between organized and unorganized material 
systems? Is it the difference between those which have nervous 
systems and those which have them not? Or is it, perhaps, the 
difference due to a specific complexity of nervous system ? When 
we raise these questions we are back again with the old problem of 
mind and body. The attempt to "side-step" dualism by invoking a 
neutral world of pure experience evades the issue. I do not say 
that dualism is the last word in this matter. But whether one call 
consciousness a function, or something else, it has an "inner 
duplicity," which cannot be evaded. 

"In order that there should be an experience, it is not suf- 
ficient that qualities and relations should be or be there; it is 
likewise necessary that they should be in a recognizable and identi- 
fiable synthesis. The synthesis is an actual factor of experience." 9 
Consciousness is always individual, and it is capable of becoming 
aware of itself as such. We are conscious in relations, and we are 
capable of being conscious that we are conscious, as well as con- 



9 E. B. McGilvray, in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific 
Methods, Vol. vi, p. 230. 



CONSCIOUSNESS 323 

scions of the specific relations in which we are conscious. Any 
theory of experience which fails to take due account of the prin- 
ciple that it is the ego which makes the transitions and recognizes 
the relations, which constitute a "personal" history, is inadequate* 
The synthetic function of conscious selfhood remains the central 
fact in the world of experience. The individual is an "I," a 
suhject of experience, which can never he reduced to the particular 
and changing contents of his experience. To say "his," or even 
"its," experience, implies an ego of some sort. Let one try to 
give a circumstantial account of a day's experiences, with all 
reference to the conscious self left out, and he will see what tire- 
some absurdities the denial of the ego lands him in. James him- 
self frequently referred to the fact that personal consciousness is 
a continuum; for example, "personal histories are processes of 
change in time and the change is one of the things immediately 
experienced." 10 "Change in this case means continuous as 
opposed to discontinuous transition." "Practically to experience 
one's personal continuum is to know the originals of the ideas of 
continuity and change." But this implies that the self is a syn- 
thetic principle which grasps together a succession of contents, and 
knows itself as the active power which does this work. What the 
self functions as, namely, as an individual focus of relationships, 
and knows itself to function as, is what the self is. 

The standpoint of James on this matter of a virginal experi- 
ence as the original reality which apparently both antedates and 
transcends the dualistic impurity of common-sense thinking is 
closely akin to the standpoint of Mach, 11 and still more to that 
of Avenarius. 12 I am not clear as to whether, when we are babies, 
who have come "trailing clouds of glory" from the world of pure 
experience, we sport in the ocean of pure experience, which later 
is falsely bifurcated, as "shades of the prison house begin to close 
upon the growing boy," and as to whether the undifferentiated 
neutrality is restored by the simple use of the word "neutrality." 
Is pure experience what we set out with, or is it what we arrive 
at, after having wandered long in the mazes of duality and un- 
neutrality ? Or is it both ? I know not. But, since James' dark 
hints have been taken up and further developed in the writings 

10 James, ibid., pp. 48 and 50. 

u Analyse der Empfindungen: translation, Analysis of the Sensations. 

°Der Menschliche Weltoegriff, and Kritik der reinen Erfahrung. 



324 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

of certain American Neo-realists I shall discuss the matter 
further with reference to their doctrines. 13 

Briefly, according to its latest oracles, neutral monism means 
the following — the world consists of an indefinite variety of 
neutral elements; that is, elements that in themselves are neither 
physical nor psychical, which constitute an indefinite variety of 
complexes, since they may be in an indefinite variety of relations. 
These neutral entities are existentially many, but qualitatively of 
the same substance, "In themselves" they are very pure and 
tenuous, for they are logical "terms" and "propositions" which, 
though logical, are active and generative of more complex entities. 
Mind is a class or group of entities within the subsisting uni- 
verse, as a physical object is another class or group (Holt). A 
mind makes a cross section of the world which is always a group 
of the integral (neutral) components of the object and of its 
immediate relations (Holt). Any mind or consciousness consists 
of certain of these complexes that are in the relation of being 
present; that is, consciousness is any part of the field of neutral 
entities that is illuminated. The same entities may exist, just 
as they are in relation to a consciousness, out of relation to con- 
sciousness without any change in them. They are the same in 
the dark as in the light. In fact consciousness, we are told, is 
like a searchlight that plays over now this, now that, group of 
objects. Consciousness is the manifold or class of all objects on 
which the illumination falls. 14 

I ask the reader to note that, if the neutral monist have his 
way, Shakespeare was clearly wrong when he asked, "What's in 
a name?" Our neutralist settles the whole issue here by a new 
baptismal formula, "N. and M. I baptize thee both neutral enr 
tities/' With what guileless simplicity may we not then accept 
the statement that "any mind consists of certain neutral complexes 

18 See Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, Chapters 12 and 13, and the 
joint work, The New Bealism, especially the essays by Perry on A Bealistic 
Theory of Independence, Montague, A Bealistic Theory of Truth and Error, 
and Holt, The Place of Sensory Experience in a Bealistic World. Also Holt 's 
book, The Concept of Consciousness, especially Chapters 6 and 13. The most 
penetrating published criticism of Neutral Monism will be found in Bertrand 
Russell's "The Nature of Acquaintance, ' ' The Monist, Vol. 24, 1914, especially 
pp. 161-187 and pp. 435-453. But Eussell has lately gone over to the camp 
of the Neutral Monist s. See his Analysis of Mind. See also G. Dawes Hicks, 
"The Basis of Critical Realism," in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 
for 1916-1917. 

14 Holt in The New Bealism, p. 352. 



CONSCIOUSNESS 325 

that are in the relation of being present in awareness" ! All we 
need is a light, to wit, a searchlight Consciousness is the result- 
ant illumination. Where does the neutralist get the searchlight, 
and what does the playing, the cross sectioning, the selecting, 
the attending? 

Here is the answer ! Any class that is formed, from the mem- 
bers of a given manifold, by some selective principle which 
is independent of the principles which have organized the mani- 
fold, may be called a cross section and such a thing is conscious- 
ness — a cross section of the universe, selected by the nervous 
system. The elements or parts of the universe selected, and thus 
included in the class mind, are all elements or parts to which the 
nervous system makes a specific response; 15 "elements which be- 
come mental content when reacted to in the specific manner char- 
teristic of the central nervous system" 16 Thus the real attentive 
and selective agency when anything, whether physical object, or 
process of the organism itself, scientific law or formula, logical 
principle or process, or psychic value, is present as consciousness, 
is the nervous system. 

Neutral monism is thus an attempt to account for the duality 
of experience, its inner duplicity (James), or the two-term rela- 
tion of subject and object, as Bertrand Russell calls it, by having 
resort to a highly hypothetical and dubious circumlocution for an 
elementary quale of experience, and by substituting for the 
empirical characteristics of consciousness and the physical world 
a set of ghostly logical entities of neuter gender which, however, 
being endowed with a nonghostly wriggle or crawl, can engender 
the complexes which ordinary mortals call mind and matter. The 
neutral entity is the Herbartian "real" redivivus. 

Neutral monism fails to account for consciousness for the 
following reasons: (1) It fails to account for the feeling of differ- 
ence between the contemplation of objects as a part of one's per- 
sonal experiences (perception) and of objects as existing apart 
from one's personal experience (imagination). (2) It does not 
explain how one could have any knowledge of past things. What 
becomes of time, without the continuity of some entity differing 
in character from an assemblage of things in space relations ? (3) 
Without the consciousness of the self-persistence of the experi- 

*lbid., p. 352 ff. 

16 Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 299. 



326 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

encing ego in time how is one to account for a present temporal 
belief in a nontemporal fact or principle, such as a logical or 
mathematical principle, an ethical value or a scientific law ? (4) 
How can there be introspection or self-consciousness, how can 
awareness of awareness exist, if awareness be simply a selective 
response of the nervous system to neutral elements ? Can a search- 
light search its own searchings? (5) Neutral monism fails to 
give a tenable theory of error. How can there be wrong judg- 
ments concerning the relations of neutral elements, if conscious- 
ness is only the passively illuminated field, a cross section of 
certain complexes of neutral elements in relation? It is a far- 
fetched explanation of error to say that the nervous system selects 
as real certain relations between elements, which relations are 
really unreal. What does this proposition mean ? 17 

(6) What does the illuminating? What makes the selective 
response ? The organism or the nervous system, we are told. But 
these are either mere physical complexes, or they are physical 
complexes plus attentive consciousness or mental activity. If they 
are the latter we have, not neutral monism, but a duality-in-unity. 
If they are the former we have, not neutral monism, but 
materialism. 

Thus neutral monism is not neutral. It is either a new and 
specious name for materialism, or it is a plausible way of glossing 
over the duality of subject and object. Either the neutral ele- 
ments which compose, by joint action, the nervous system are 
just physical elements, or there is a hyper-physical principle of 
selective synthesis. 

(7) Neutral monism involves psychological atomism (Holt 
sees this). But atomism is untrue to the unitary nature of self- 
activity and self-feeling. It is really an attempt to revive 
Hume's philosophy of the self as a bundle of atomistic "impres- 
sions" and their copies. But what does the bundling, the shifting 
of the field of illumination ? Hume was more logical. He averred 

17 1 am aware that Holt makes a brave attempt to dispose of these objec- 
tions, but to my mind his explanations only reveal the more clearly the arti- 
ficiality of the whole procedure of neutral monism. Holt attempts to explain, 
in terms of neutral entities, knowledge of the past and future, especially of 
the past, and the fact of error. I have not space here to examine his argu- 
ments, and I must content myself with inviting the reader to compare the 
explanation of knowledge of the past and future and of error given on the 
basis of neutral monism, and that given in the present work on the hypothesis 
that the conscious self is a temporally active knower and purposive agent. 



CONSCIOUSNESS 327 

that he did not know. He saw that the nervous system could be 
nothing but a bundle of impressions, too. Even a searchlight is a 
planned and unitary machine assembled by one who thinks himself 
a purposive unifier of physical elements. Someone plays it over 
objects for a specific purpose. 

Either the light of consciousness is nothing, no one assembles 
or works it, and it reveals nothing since there is nothing to reveal ; 
or it is a product of the nervous system (materialism) ; or it is 
a function of a psychophysical entity (my own view and the view 
of all who believe in an ego). 

Neutral monism is only a new kind of materialism, parading 
in the guise of a multitude of tiny and bloodless logical "entities" 
or "absolutes." Paraphrasing Bradley's well-known words, reality 
is not an unearthly ballet of bloodless "terms" and "propositions," 
even though these be inconsistently endowed with the power of 
generation. 18 

Another recent attempt to make a novel definition of conscious- 
ness is that of moderate or functional behaviorism. Immoderate 
behaviorism denies to consciousness any genuinely verifiable func- 
tion. Functional behaviorism defines consciousness as the margin 
or fringe in adaptive reactions, where instinct and pure habit are 
inadequate. The function of the brain is to coordinate responses, 
and consciousness is thus a correlation between bodily processes 
and changes in the objects. It is the sign of the specific kind of 
brain activity that has to do with the correlation of stimulus and 
response at points where instinct and pure habit are inadequate. 19 

Selective determination and redirection of behavior by a future 
that is made present in perception (and imagination), "control by 

18 In evidence of the justice of my criticism I make the following further 
citations and references : 

"Its processes (the nervous system) are of a mathematical and neutral 
structure, just as much as the path of a ray of light is a function of densities, 
temperatures, magnetic deflections, and indices of refraction — neutral entities 
all, and unidentifiable with any, even the smoothest atoms of Democritus. ' ' 
(Holt, The Concept of Consciousness, p. 255.) 

"But just as in the sciences of physics and chemistry these physical 
entities are seen on analysis to be aggregates of logical or neutral entities, so 
that the physical processes are simply not describable as a movement of 
material particles but are strictly mathematical manifolds." (Cf. Holt, op. 
cit., Chaps. 7, 11, 12, especially, p. 255.) 

19 Taken almost verbatim from Bode, "The Definition of Consciousness, ' ' 
Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. x (1913), pp. 
232-239. See "The Method of Introspection," the same journal and volume, 
pp. 85-91 and "Consciousness and Psychology" in Creative Intelligence. 



328 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

a future that is made present," is what constitutes consciousness. 
"A perceived object is a stimulus which controls or directs the 
organism by results which have not yet occurred, but which will, 
or may, occur in the future; . . . the future is transferred into 
the present so as to become effective in the guidance of be- 
havior." 20 

Clearly this view is right to the extent that attentive conscious- 
ness is a concomitant in the making of responses to novel stimuli, 
that is, the meeting of new situations by the organism. It is right 
in finding a distinctive quale of consciousness to be teleological 
adaptation by anticipation, through which the future becomes 
operative in the present. But this is not the whole story. This 
conception of consciousness is too narrow to cover all the facts. 
The functions of consciousness are not exhausted in meeting novel 
situations, and controlling behavior by reference to the future. 
When I am enjoying a delightful aesthetic experience, an object 
in nature or art, or contemplating with satisfaction the symmetry 
and harmony of a mathematical construction or the logical struc- 
ture of any intellectual system, or "living" in the past with some 
significant historical period, event or character, my consciousness, 
keen, vivid, and delightful, may have no reference to my own 
future behavior or that of anyone else. This pragmatic or instru- 
mentalist conception of consciousness errs by taking one impor- 
tant function of consciousness and making it the sole function to 
the exclusion of other worthful functions. Disinterested contem- 
plation and enjoyment of an experience for its own sake can be 
called "behavior" only in a very Pickwickian sense ; and yet it is, 
for some human beings at least (and I believe for many in one 
form or other), one of the most significant and worthful functions 
of being conscious. "For to admire an' for to see," although "It 
never done no good to me," is, in the words of Kipling's Ulysses 
of The Seven fieas, a joyful and persistent function of conscious- 
ness. 

The conscious ego is active in the organization of experience. 
Even in receiving and recognizing sensations the self is active in 
some small degree. It is active, in much higher degree, in organ- 
izing, classifying, and connecting causally and teleologically its 
rudimentary experiences. In the purposive processes by which 

20 Bode, ' ' Consciousness and Psychology/' Creative Intelligence, p. 244. 



CONSCIOUSNESS 329 

ends are formulated and realized, in both practical and theoretical 
life, the conscious activity of the ego is most fully manifested. 
In brief, consciousness is the function of selective response, 
finding of meanings, and creative purposive synthesis, by which 
the psychophysical self is able to effect new arrangements in ex- 
perience to meet novel situations in its physical or social environ- 
ment or in its own inner psychophysical content; and thus to 
create, maintain and enhance the enjoyed values tff experience. 

III. The Idealistic Theory of Consciousness 

Objective idealists such as Fichte, Hegel, Green, Bosanquet 
and Eoyce find in mind or self-conscious individuality at its 
highest level a key to the structure of reality. Bosanquet, for 
example, finds in mind the true system of oneness in manyness, 
of the harmony of sameness and otherness, of self with self, of the 
solution of the contradictions in experience. In short, mind is the 
true type of dynamic and significant organization of parts into a 
living system, of the continuous realization, through the unrest of 
negativity and the conquest thereof, of a harmonious whole or 
individuality. Thus mind is the key to the structure and meaning 
of the entire cosmos. Whether this claim be justified must be left 
unquestioned for the present. 21 

Certainly the idealistic conception of the nature of conscious 
individuality contains a profound truth and must be included in 
any philosophy that is to be adequate to the whole meaning of 
experience. Self-conscious individuality is dynamic and social, 
the self develops in interplay with other selves and with the 
physical order. The continuity of the self's life is found in 
rational valuation and purposive activity. This life involves a 
dialectic process. Negativity, the practical and theoretical recog- 
nition of oppositions or differences between self and not-self (other 
selves and the physical order) is a prime condition for the growth 
and maintenance of selfhood. The development and maintenance 



21 See further, book v, ''Cosmology or the General Structure of Beauty." 
The following are important references for the idealistic conception of 
consciousness: F. H. Bradley Appearance and Reality, especially chapters 14, 
15, 19, 26; J. B. Baillie, The Idealistic Construction of Experience ; B. Bosan- 
quet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, especially Lecture vi; J. S. 
McKenzie, Elements of Constructive Philosophy, especially Book ii, Chaps. 6, 
7, 8, 10 and 11 ; Josiah Eoyce, The World and the Individual, Index. 



330 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

of self-conscious individuality is thus the process of transcending 
the actually attained selfhood, the process of ever finding the one 
in the other, of overcoming the opposition between self and other ; 
which opposition, so far from being an insoluble contradiction, is 
rather the play of difference or contrast within the nature of life 
and mind itself. Thus mind, regarded as equivalent to self- 
consciousness, is a systematic and developing unity which realizes 
itself and maintains itself by continually going beyond itself, by 
apparently negating itself, by dying unto itself in an other than 
self. Self and not-self, the individual and its other, have no mean- 
ing or existence when sundered from one another. The opposition, 
the conflict between self and other, is not the impassable separation 
of two absolute, incompatible and different kinds of reality. This 
opposition is the prime condition of self-realization through self- 
transcendence. 

The idealist finds in the stubborn and resisting character which 
physical nature presents, a phase of the otherness or negativity by 
which the self in transcending its already achieved character 
realizes itself. The qualities of brute matter, the struggle for 
existence, pain, disease, and death, are incidents necessary to the 
development of souls. The dialectic of selfhood is even more 
rationally and continuously manifested in man's social life than 
in man's relations with physical nature. Every social relation into 
which the self enters involves the dialectic, the otherness ; that is, 
the interplay of differing beings. Only by overcoming the opposi- 
tion between self and the other self in love and marriage, in the 
community life, the vocational life, the national life, the religious 
life, can personality live and develop. a He that seeketh his life 
shall lose it and he that loseth his life shall find it." The self 
which tries to evade these relationships, which gives no hostages to 
fortune, which buries its one talent in the ground, which takes no 
risks, which tries to live like the epicurean wise man, by shutting 
itself off as far as possible from all relationships which may dis- 
turb its equanimity, thereby shuts itself off from the possibility 
of true self-realization. Life is an obstacle race. 

This is what Hegel means by the power of negativity as the 
moving spirit of life and mind. In maintaining one's physical 
well-being, in learning and discovering, in living in social relations 
as a member of the family and community, the individual finds 
his true selfhood only in going outside of his own selfhood and in 



CONSCIOUSNESS , 331 

discovering his true nature in the other. Spinoza said all deter- 
mination is negation or limitation. The objective idealist adds 
that all negation involves affirmation. Consequently, only through 
negation or limitation is limitation transcended. Logically, all 
genuine negative judgments, that is, all that are more than mere 
word play, involve correlative affirmative judgments. One can 
deny that a specific attribute inheres in a subject only if one be 
aware that some other positive attribute incompatible with the 
attribute denied inheres in the subject. If I say, for instance, 
that to-day is not cold, I imply that it has a positive quality in- 
compatible with coldness. If I say that A is not honest, I say by 
implication that he has a positive quality incompatible with hon- 
esty. On the other hand, affirmative judgments imply correlative 
negative judgments. If to-day is warm, it is not cold. If A is a 
thief, he is not honest. Eeality, as object of thought, must be a 
coherent system of differences or correlative individual elements. 
Thus affirmation and negation are two sides of the same whole of 
judgment. The objective idealist widens the application of this 
logical principle to the whole of life. Negation is a dynamic 
quality of conscious life taken as a whole. If reality were a static 
and lifeless system, then the power of the negative would be an 
illusion. The dynamic quality of negation means that reality has 
a living and spiritual character, that it is a concrete system of 
interrelated selves. If reality be rational, if it moves through 
and by the activity of spirit, negation is an essential phase of 
reality; for the power of the negative consists in the continuous 
self-differentiation of individuality as a living member of a system 
of individuals. Self-conscious individuality can develop only 
through conflict, through opposition, which issues in the pro- 
founder union and positive growth of selves in social relations. In 
the ethical realm the self becomes a spiritual reality, it serves 
intrinsic values, only through meeting and overcoming the opposi- 
tion between reason and nature, between impulse and the social 
ethos, between itself and other selves. It is through the conflict 
within its own bosom, which is reflected in the conflict in its social 
relations, that the self wins at the same moment internal harmony 
and social harmony, and only through this process is ethical per- 
sonality developed. Feeling depends for its enlargement and 
enrichment, by the attainment of a richer and more comprehensive 
harmony,- on the fact that in its higher forms it is an experience 



332 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

of harmony in difference which overcomes and holds in solution 
the opposition or contrast of individualities. Such states of feel- 
ing are preeminently love and friendship. That these states of 
feeling are harmonious and pervasive unions of differences, that 
they always hold in concentrated solution the element of negation, 
is shown by the intensity and suddenness with which they may pass 
into their opposites. 

In religion the development of spiritual experience through 
the overcoming of opposition reaches its climax. The finite self 
becomes conscious of itself as an apparently independent being, 
then conscious of its sinfulness, misery and worthlessness as in- 
volved in such independence ; it denies itself in the presence of the 
absolute and perfect, and in this very self-denial, this humiliation, 
this overcoming of selfhood, this dying to live, the finite self be- 
comes renewed and uplifted, it becomes one with the infinite and 
perfect. And, on the other hand, the absolute self, as concrete living 
spirit, must find its own life, as self-expressive activity and love, 
in and through the lives of the society of individual and finite 
members of reality. 

At the outset of its career the self has only being-in-itself. It, 
is only a potential personality. It becomes an actual personality, 
a spiritual individual, through the dialectic by which, in finding 
an other than its present desire, passion or aim, in the conflicting 
desires within itself, in conflict with physical selves, in the clash 
with other wills, it becomes able to identify itself with the other, 
to expand itself into union with the other, and thus to attain a 
being in-and-for-itself, to return into itself enriched by its self- 
alienation and self-denial in its world. The most familiar experi- 
ences of the othering or dialectic process are to be found in friend- 
ship, love, social and political life, the life of the family. Art, 
religion, science, and philosophy are themselves more subliminated 
stages in the othering process by which the self, not finding else- 
where full satisfaction of the craving for conscious union with the 
universe, finds, in the expression of its ideals in sensuous 
materials (art), in the imaginative forms of picture thinking 
(religion) and finally in the conceptual forms of thought (philos- 
ophy) wider and deeper experiences, of its membership in the 
universal spiritual order, of its kinship with the complete spirit of 
harmonious thought. 

Thus the idealistic doctrine of consciousness or experience is 



CONSCIOUSNESS 333 

turned into a metaphysic or cosmology, by the identification of the 
significant features of human experience, as regarded from the 
point of view of the dialectic process, with the meaning of reality 
as a whole. Whether this identification be legitimate is a question 
to be considered later. We shall find grounds, as we proceed, for 
holding that the idealistic interpretation of experience ignores cer- 
tain aspects of the life of selfhood; specifically, that it tends to 
merge the individual self in the absolute. The doctrine of the 
othering process, the dialectic of life, is a true insight in regard 
to the nature of conscious individuality. But it is not the whole 
truth. In the measure in which the self grows into full person- 
ality, it becomes more self-determining, more an inner focus and 
self-moving center of social and cosmic relationships. As the 
center of its individuality increases in harmony, so its radii of 
relationships are enlarged. The richer and better organized a 
selfhood, the more distinctive and central and uniquely character- 
istic is its individuality. Therefore, I shall argue later on, the 
world of selves cannot be regarded as included in one all-embracing 
self. 



CHAPTER XXV 



THE SUBCONSCIOUS 



If we picture the contents of consciousness as a field, like the 
field of vision, we may say that this field is not equally illuminated 
at all points. Between its vivid center, which may he occupied hy 
a feeling, a perception, or a plan of action, and the periphery, at 
which consciousness ceases, there may be a penumbra, or fringe, 
of contents of which one is only dimly aware and with degrees of 
dimness. Relative to the vividness of the central content, the 
contents which are in the shade have been called "subconscious. " 
A less equivocal designation for this feature of consciousness would 
be subattentive or vague consciousness. It is not properly called 
"subconscious," since there is no break between what one is vividly 
conscious of and what one is more dimly aware of. In any pulse 
of consciousness all its distinguishable features are parts of the 
total state of being conscious. 1 

The second type of so-called subconscious process consists of 
elements of experience that are not actually present as such in con- 
sciousness at the moment, but of which the mind may become 
aware by attentive memory and discrimination. If, when writing, 
I do not attend to the sound of a bell ringing or a clock striking, 
and can afterwards recall the sound, it is argued that the sound 
must, at the time of its occurrence, have entered the field of my 
experience as a subconscious content. Again, we take in complex 
perceptual and affective experiences as wholes or fused masses, 
which experiences we afterwards analyze into their elements. One 
can listen to a violin or orchestra as a total musical experience, or 
one* can analyze the music into its component tones. Similarly, 

1 It is very questionable if there is any such thing as wholly inattentive 
consciousness. The focal objects of clear consciousness may be shifted with 
great rapidity, and, in this shifting, consciousness may carry with it a con- 
siderable mass of vague details. I hold that clearness of consciousness is 
equivalent to degree of attention; in other words, that attention is not a 
special power or phase of consciousness. The scope and degree of attention 
is the scope and degree of consciousness. 

334 



THE SUBCONSCIOUS 335 

one can analyze an object, perceived as a combination of various 
sense-qualities, into sensations of form, color, touch, smell, taste. 
In the total concrete experience these sensational elements are said 
to be subconsciously present. A more tenable explanation of 
facts of the first kind is that the past stimuli, which I did not per- 
ceive at the moment of receiving them, left traces in my brain ; and 
that, before these traces have become too weak, I can shift the 
emphasis of my consciousness and thus become aware of the 
objects. In the case of fused perceptual experiences the same 
principle of explanation holds good. I do not really sensate the 
separate sensations as such, unless, by attentive analysis, I shift 
the emphasis of my consciousness, and then, for the first time the 
separate sensations become discriminated contents of my experi- 
ence. 

A third and more important type of alleged subconscious 
process is that of dissociated or "split-off" ideas and systems of 
ideas present in the same body without mutual awareness. Pro- 
fessor Morton Prince found in his case of Miss Beauchamp 
and others, that there actually coexisted, along with the primary 
or dominating consciousness, other active systems of ideas, with 
distinctive characters or individualities, of which the primary con- 
sciousness was not aware. He finds that these phenomena occur 
in the neatest and most precise form and "are best adapted for 
experimental study in so-called automatic writing and speech." 2 
"The one fundamental principle and criterion of the subconscious 
is," he says, "dissociation and coactivity." 3 And the point at issue 
he rightly says is this — do ideas ever occur outside the synthesis of 
the personal self-consciousness under any conditions, whether of 
normal or abnormal life; so that the subject is unaware of these? 
Many investigators agree with him that such ideas do thus occur. 
But for whom do those ideas occur? Who is aware of them, 
besides the observer who assumes their existence ? Ideas can exist 
only for an individual consciousness. If, then, co-conscious com- 
plexes of ideas exist this means that, simultaneously, there must 
be associated with one brain several distinct individual centers of 
consciousness or "souls." There must be quasi-independent com- 
plexes of percepts, images, affections, and purposes, each with a 
unity and individuality of its own. 

2 Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. ii, pp. 69, 70. 
1 Ibid., Vol. ii, p. 78. 



336 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

The evidence for these co-conscious systems falls under the fol- 
lowing rubrics: (1) The multiple personalities discussed in the 
next chapter; (2) automatic writing; (3) the anaesthesia and be- 
havior of hypnotized subjects who, in the post-hypnotic condition, 
have no memory of what occurred to them when in the hypnotic 
state; (4) the post-hypnotic fulfillment of suggestions, given while 
the subjects are in the hypnotic state. These, it is said, may 
extend to blindness, deafness, and general insensibility to another 
person's presence; and even to the subject playing the suggested 
role of an entirely different individual; (5) the counting of num- 
bers, drawing of figures, etc., which have been impressed on an 
anaesthetic region of the subject's skin. 

It is argued that the intelligence and purposiveness of subjects 
observed under these conditions require the assumption of a sub- 
conscious self or secondary personality to account for them. Now, 
it seems to me that the application of the term "personality," 
which properly refers to the maximum of conscious and rational 
synthesis in our psychical life, is, in such cases, a misnomer. I 
do not find in these cases sufficient evidence of intelligence, rational 
integration, and purposiveness, to merit calling them "persons." 
Moreover I think it probable that many of these phenomena are 
due to simulation. Many of them do not require the invocation 
of any different principles than those involved in ordinary physio- 
logical automatisms. We do not invoke co-conscious complexes of 
ideas to explain walking through crowded streets with our minds 
intent on things very remote from our immediate environment, 
writing while thinking of something else, or the anaesthesia of the 
football or lacrosse player. 

There is no line of mystery separating the automatisms and 
suggestibility of hypnotized subjects, or even multiple selves, from 
normal experience. We are all to a very large extent automata, 
and to an equal extent suggestible beings. Our manifestations of 
individuality undergo mutation from year to year, from month to 
month, and sometimes even from hour to hour. We all play a 
variety of roles, at home, in business, in church, in politics, at the 
club, on a vacation. In the lives of normal selves single feeling- 
impulses and groups or systems of feeling-impulses — love, hate, 
anger, lust, passion for adventure, desire to break the monotony 
of existence, to run amuck of convention — arise frequently. Ap- 
parently they come from nowhere and intrude themselves into the 



THE SUBCONSCIOUS 337 

humdrum of consciousness, often with surprising suddenness and 
strength. 

Below the well-defined area of normal conscious life, there is 
the ill-defined and teeming region of unconscious tendencies, of 
blind impulsions and vague unrests, of biologically determined 
instincts and appetites, which seem to be psychical as well as bodily 
in character ; in short, there seems to be a deep reservoir of uncon- 
scious psychical energies, which constitute, to a very large extent, 
the springs of our conscious life-activities. 

Further, there is the problem as to how our memories, acquired 
habits of thought and action, highly specialized knowledge, prac- 
tical powers of judgment and technical skill, persist when they are 
not in conscious operation? Again, what are we to say of sleep 
and dreams ? What becomes of the psychical self in deep and 
dreamless sleep ? Is there such a state as absolute suspension of 
thought, or does the soul always think, even in dreamless and 
profound slumber ? Is the belief that we were wholly unconscious 
simply due to the rapid oblivescence and the striking break of 
continuity in experience, which takes place on our waking to sur- 
roundings that are incongruous with the fairy land of the dreaming 
life of slumber ? When one awakens with the solution of a difficult 
problem that was left unsolved when one went to sleep, did the 
brain think without^the mind, did it in short carry on "unconscious 
cerebration" ? Or was the mind consciously active in sleep, and 
does it simply forget the intermediate steps, when the conclusion 
becomes clear at the moment of waking? Or does the mind, re- 
freshed by rest, undisturbed by any train of conflicting interests, 
and with the last train of predormant conscious activity ready to 
be revived, concentrate on the problem, when it awakens ; and, with 
enhanced and unimpeded activity, reach a solution so rapidly 
that the result seems to come instantaneously and out of the 
dark? 

Are dreams explicable solely in terms of the psychical contents 
and neural stimuli which persist from the day's waking life, from 
the internal bodily states such as the condition of the digestive 
system or the sexual glands, and from local sense stimuli, such as 
those occasioned by lying in an unusual position or the pressure 
of some protuberance ? Or must we invoke another factor in the 
shape of unconscious psychical energies which have lain dormant 
or suppressed during the waking life ? 



338 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

Professor Signrand Freud, in his book Die Traumdeutung, 
argues very effectively for the view that dreams are suppressed 
wishes, and that most of them go back in origin to the repressed 
impulses of childhood and adolescence, notably to the sex impulse, 
the most persistently repressed of all man's primary appetites. 
Professor Freud's argument supports very strongly, from the facts 
of dream life, the doctrine of persistent unconscious psychical 
complexes. I have not space to discuss here his general psycho- 
logical theory as based on his study of dreams. He distinguishes 
three types of psychical life — the conscious, the preconscious which 
may become conscious, and the unconscious. 

The Freudian theory exaggerates the extent to which the char- 
acter of personality is determined by unconscious complexes. In 
particular, it greatly exaggerates the influence of suppressed sex 
impulses. This is a case of the neuropath's fallacy. Normal per- 
sonality is interpreted in terms of data gathered chiefly from 
neurotics, especially neurotic women. The grotesque ingenuity 
with which Jung, in his book The Unconscious, twists all literature 
and religion into expressions of the libido is another instance of 
riding a theory, based on human abnormalities, to death. The indi- 
vidual whose sex life is a healthy part of a well-balanced person- 
ality does not suffer much from suppression complexes. Un- 
doubtedly many dreams are the expression of thwarted wishes, but 
many others are merely the consequence of the free play of mental 
association started by some casual thought or experience of the day 
before. However, Freud and his school have brought to attention 
two important truths in regard to human personality — 1, that the 
character of personality is determined to a great extent by its 
unconscious constituents ; 2, that the unconscious, no less than the 
conscious, factors of personality are dynamic. Indeed, often the 
unconscious is more dynamic than the conscious. 

I shall later argue for the reality of unconscious psychical com- 
plexes on more general grounds. While the evidence furnished 
by a careful study of dreams does powerfully support the belief 
in an unconscious psychical life or energy, this by no means in- 
volves the reality of the so-called "subconscious self" in the sense 
of a being wiser and more powerful than the conscious self. 
Granted that some dreams are the expression of repressed desires, 
and that these are chiefly infantile in origin (I am not ready to 
admit the latter proposition to the extent which Professor Freud 



THE SUBCONSCIOUS 339 

argues for), all that is necessarily implied thereby in regard to the 
unconscious is the persistence in the adult of biological impulses 
and appetites. The organized rational and moral life of the nor- 
mal adult supervenes upon, and is indeed the transformation of, 
the primitive biological individuality, through the influences of 
cultural training and intellectual activity. 

The possibility of "split-off ideas" or a co-conscious ideas" may 
be conceded, but their actuality is not established by the evidence 
adduced. The purposiveness and intelligence of automatic writ- 
ing, posthypnotic suggestions, and so forth, would be equally well 
accounted for on the Freudian theory . of unconscious psychical 
energies. The latter theory does not involve, as does the former, 
the assumption that "ideas" can exist either singly or in complexes, 
apart from the main stream of consciousness. Coconscious ideas 
would be states of consciousness existing apart from any personal 
knower. But such a notion is a contradiction in terms. If real, 
they would involve at best more than one personal knower in the 
same body. Such an assumption is both improbable and super- 
fluous. That several mutually independent clusters of ideas exist 
in the same living body is very unlikely. Their existence would 
involve the absence or suspension of the principle of personal syn- 
thesis and memory, without which there can he no consciousness 
and no ideas. 

We have now to embark upon the quest for the "subconscious 
self" in its most mystical form. In support of the reality of the 
distinct subconscious self there are cited the cases of sudden in- 
spiration, inventive work, improvisations, and creations of men of 
genius, who have written great poems, composed great music, or 
hit upon world-transforming thoughts, without knowing how or 
why they did these things. According to F. W. H. Myers and 
others, the subliminal self or subconscious self is the great wonder 
worker in the realm of human personality. It is a reservoir of 
almost unlimited power, wisdom, and insight. It is not a far cry 
from the assertion of the subliminal source of genius and of all 
unusual mental achievements to its invocation as the real agent in 
automatic writing, prophetic and warning dreams, second sight, 
telepathy, and the supposed veridical messages from departed 
spirits* Finally, since this subliminal self is unplumbable in its 
depths, deathless, and, like Melchisedek, without local habitation 
or parentage, why not regard it as our organ of communication 



340 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

with Deity; nay, perhaps, as in very truth the absolute cosmic self 
speaking in and through our fragmentary selfhoods. 4 

It behooves us here to walk warily and to keep all our critical 
wits about us. There is probably no other psychological and meta- 
physical conception which has been used in so many shifting 
senses, or that has been made the catch-all for so much pseudo- 
science and mythology as that of the "subconscious self." 

The concept of the subconscious is properly employed as a 
principle of interpretation in the metaphysics of psychology to 
designate the psychical substrate and source of consciousness. The 
inborn and acquired powers of conscious selfhood seem to involve 
the reality of a subconscious psychical energy or life as their sup- 
port and ground. The development of congenital capacities, and 
the acquisition and retention of new powers of judgment and 
action, lead to the hypothesis of neuro-psycMcal dispositions, in 
which these functions and capacities are conserved, when not in 
actual conscious use, and grounded when in actual use. 5 The only 
alternative to this view is the hypothesis that the structure and 
processes of the nervous system constitute the sole conditions of 
consciousness, and that consciousness arises simply when neural 
processes reach a specific degree of intensity and complication. 
From this standpoint the enduring or substantial basis of all 
mental life consists of neurograms, that is, neural paths, in the 
cerebral cortex. Unless one is to regard the central nervous sys- 
tem as the sole conservator and condition of operation for all 
congenital and acquired psychical capacities, including the most 
highly developed powers of trained expert judgment, and of re- 
fined and elevated feeling, one must admit the actuality of un- 
conscious neuro-psychical dispositions or organized potencies of 
conscious life. At any moment in which a cross-section of our 
adult conscious life may be envisaged there are many of these 
dispositions which show no signs of conscious activity. Either 
the powers and achievements of the self, which are not explicitly 
in consciousness at the moment of experience, are conserved 
simply and solely as structural modifications of nervous tissues 



4 See Myers' Human Personality and Its Survival after Death; also 
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. 

5 On this matter compare G. F. Stout, Manual of Psychology, passim, and 
James Ward, article, "Psychology," Encyclopcedia Britannica, 11th ed., Vol. 
xxii, p. 560. 



THE SUBCONSCIOUS 341 

and their functioning; or they represent, in addition, functions 
of an immaterial or psychical principle of activity which is never 
fully represented in the momentary awareness of the self. Both 
alternatives present almost equal difficulties for thought. On 
the one hand, how shall one conceive all the powers of poet and 
artist, all the garnered wisdom of the sage's ripe life, all the 
knowledge and expert judgment of the statesman or scientist, as 
persisting simply in the structure of the brain? On the other 
hand, how shall one conceive an immaterial and unconscious prin- 
ciple of psychical activity, when "psychical" is known to us im- 
mediately in the form of consciousness alone ? 

A final decision between these two hypotheses must depend on 
one's general metaphysical theory as to the relation between mind 
and brain. I shall argue later that the view which assumes at 
once a distinction and an interdependence between mind and brain 
is the most defensible hypothesis. If one accept, as I do, this 
duality-in-unity, the problem as to how our psychical dispositions 
persist becomes the question as to the best way of conceiving the 
actuality of mental functions when these are not consciously op- 
erative. I find the most satisfactory conception to be that the 
mind is a complex principle of activity or psychical energy, no 
phase of which is ever wholly in abeyance. "The soul always 
thinks." The enduring self is a synthetic principle of activity 
which includes more than is in consciousness at any moment and 
is the generating principle of consciousness. This principle of 
synthesis is immediately known in self-feeling, and inferentially 
known as the enduring unifier and sustainer of all capacities to 
think and to act which become manifest in the histories of selves. 
In 'part, then, the self is, at any instant, unconscious. It sus- 
tains and binds together successive moments in the empirical con- 
sciousness. The actual self is a principle of progressive synthesis, 
a continuously active power of neuro-psychical organization, which 
can never be fully revealed in any single instant of conscious 
feeling and activity. 

Precisely to what extent the psychical self is dependent upon 
the nervous mechanism for the conservation and development of 
its powers we cannot say. It evidently depends on neural stimuli 
for the materials and occasions on which it reacts with percepts, 
images, meanings, volitional acts, and emotions. But it is open 
to one to maintain that the results of these reactions persist as 



342 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the neuro-psycMcal dispositions, and that, to this extent, the soul 
develops capacities whose conservation is not accounted for in 
terms of neural action alone. The unifying and sustaining prin- 
ciple of selfhood is active in the successive moments of conscious- 
ness, and it persists in sleep and in other states of so-called uncon- 
sciousness; but all the specific modifications of the soul, in the 
shape of habits, memories, trained powers, are conditioned, in 
their development and expression, by modifications of the struc- 
ture of the central nervous system. 

Accepting, then, the reality of unconscious psychical disposi- 
tions, what follows in regard to the subconscious % It does not 
follow that there is a distinct subconscious self in each individual, 
more real and enduring than the conscious self. For these endur- 
ing dispositions to feel, judge, and act, no matter how multifari- 
ous and significant they may be, are yet continuous and inter- 
woven with the individual's conscious life. The self is one in its 
potentially conscious and its actually conscious life. When I 
bring to bear on a problem a trained power of judgment, which 
I have not for some time exercised, my conscious life still pre- 
serves the continuity of this reawakening function with the domi- 
nant purposes and experiences which have preceded that reawak- 
ening and which condition the emergence of the new act. 

Finally, we must consider, briefly, the mystical doctrine, al- 
ready referred to, of a subliminal self; gifted with extraordinary 
wisdom, insight, and wonderworking power, and which, neverthe- 
less, engages in such trivial exercises as automatic writing, table 
rapping and tipping et hoc genus omne. This subconscious self 
is held to be the source of mankind's most significant inspirations, 
and achievements. It finds its chief support in the dubious and 
misty realms of so-called "psychical research." 

The "subliminal self" is invoked to explain prophetic and 
warning dreams; to account for the messages conveyed by auto- 
matic writing and telepathy; to explain the inspirations of poets, 
prophets, and revealers ; indeed, to account for all genius and the 
supernormal achievements of ordinary persons; finally, as the 
organ through which we may hold converse with the spirits of the 
departed and with Deity or the all-inclusive cosmic self. 

Now, to take up these points in reverse order, I do not under- 
stand why, since my waking normal consciousness, humdrum and 
commonplace though it be, is the form of psychical activity on 



THE SUBCONSCIOUS 343 

which I must depend for my general intellectual and moral conduct 
in everyday life, the cosmic self and the spirits of the departed 
should ignore it and choose to send their messages only through 
this mysterious and uncertain realm of subliminal selfhood, which 
occasionally makes an eruption into the experience of a few fa- 
vored individuals. Surely it is not fair, if there be a moral and 
rational economy of reality, that a few individuals, not otherwise 
remarkable above their fellows, should enjoy this monopoly of 
a private road to God and the spirit world ! Moreover, the char- 
acter of the messages hitherto received, their silly inanity and 
triviality amounting at times to stupid rot, do not augur well for 
the intelligence and aesthetic capacities either of the subliminal 
self who serves as receiver and transmitter, or of the senders of 
the messages on the other shore of the river Styx. However, let 
us suppose that veridical messages have been received from the 
dead, by the method of cross-correspondences. 6 These messages 
purport to come from a conscious person, and to be transmitted 
through the medium's organism to another conscious self. All 
that these messages would prove, if we took them at their face 
value, would be that the communicating spirit has preserved its 
personal consciousness and that a controlling self, the "Bector" 
or "Imperator," for example, might communicate through the 
brain of a living person. It might be possible that an individual 
soul could use several different brains for its communications with 
other souls but it is highly improbable that it ever does. The 
subliminal self is a superfluous hypothesis in this connection. 
It is equally superfluous in the case of telepathy. Let us suppose 
that messages are actually conveyed and sensations felt, across 
great reaches of space; say that almost instantaneously messages 
have been conveyed from India to England or America. These 
messages purport to come from conscious selves to other con- 
scious selves. The fact that they may be uttered through auto- 
matic writing only serves to throw doubt on their genuineness, 
since they may, in these cases, be produced by the suggestion of 
the operator himself, or of the recipient on the operator, or, 



* On this matter see PLibbert Journal, Vol. vii, pp. 241 ff. ; and Proceedings 
of the (English) Society for Psychical Research, Vol. xx, pp. 205-275; xxi, pp. 
219-391; xxii, pp. 19-416; xxiv, pp. 170-200, 201-253. See also the writings 
of Sir Oliver Lodge, and James H. Hyslop; especially the latter 's Contact with 
the Other World. Also Henry Holt, On the Cosmic Relations. 



344 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

finally may be the genuine results of the reputed transmitter's or 
"control's" suggestion. Admitting a genuine telepathic commun- 
ication between say India and America, what might we infer? 
Several possibilities would be open. Either that minds can some- 
times act directly on one another without physical media of com- 
munication ; or, that there may be an unknown physical medium, 
by means of which, if the psychical transmitting and receiving 
instruments be properly attuned, the message is conveyed and 
taken up with great rapidity. Light and electricity travel very 
rapidly and the action of gravitation seems to be instantaneous, 
why not the physical medium of telepathy ? The third, and least 
intelligible explanation of telepathy is the distinct subliminal self. 

Possibly all so-called telepathic phenomena will turn out to 
be the results of either; (a) autosuggestion by the medium, as 
in the phenomena of hysteria, or (&) hetero-suggestion by which 
the recipient of the message influences the medium. The former's 
expectancy may be the chief factor in producing the result. "Psy- 
chical" individuals have a suspicious way of meeting the demands 
of their patrons and friends. 

It is extremely difficult to determine what residuum of auto- 
matic writing is performed without the cooperation of the writer's 
consciousness. Admitting that there is such a residuum, its modus 
operandi need not differ, in principle, from the automatisms of 
hysterical and disorganized selves; it may be like the secondarily 
automatic processes of the normal self, which, when first learned 
and practiced, required the cooperation of attentive consciousness ; 
but which, when they have been repeated a number of times, come 
to be carried out without voluntary attention thereto, and, con- 
sequently, without clear consciousness thereof. A very large 
fraction of the phenomena of automatic writing is thus the result- 
ant of forgotten experiences which arise unbidden, and, without 
apparent antecedent grounds, determine the course of the writing. 
If automatic writing does really sometimes produce results inex- 
plicable by the writer's previous experience, or by the conscious 
suggestions of his associates, these results may be due to a super- 
normal sensitiveness to the mental contents of some one present. 
Thus, admitting the reality of unconscious psychical com- 
plexes, it is a misnomer to designate these vague, irregular, shift- 
ing psychical complexes, which are expressed in automatic writing, 
hypnotic and posthypnotic suggestion, disintegrated individuality, 



THE SUBCONSCIOUS 345 

and so forth, as true selves or personalities. These phenomena 
bear witness, at the most, to temporary, and in some cases, perma- 
nent mental dissociation; perhaps conditioned by the dissociation 
of the systems of neurones whose normal associations are the im- 
mediate physiological basis of our coherent waking consciousness. 7 

We do not get forward in the work of interpreting the mys- 
teries of the psychical self, and its relation to the brain, by hypo- 
statizing a second and subliminal self and endowing it with tran- 
scendent powers. This type of explanation is on a par with the 
explanation of the existence of various species of plants and ani- 
mals by saying that God created them, or the relationships of 
physical bodies by saying that God holds them together. It is a 
clear case of explaining ignotum per ignotius. 

The "unconsciousness" with which genius does its work is a 
well-worn phrase. The expression is a loose designation for the 
swift intuitive energy with which the genius goes forward to his 
goal, and for the objectivity of his mental attitude when immersed 
in creative work. There is danger of confusion between "unself- 
conscious" and unconscious. It does not mean that the conscious 
individuality of the genius has no part in his achievements, and 
that he must call in the subliminal self to account for them. In- 
deed, such a vague and vast subterranean reservoir of psychical 
power could have no individuality, no bounds or specific types of 
creative life. The genius would have no part or lot as an individual 
in his work, and we should not give him any credit or attach to 
the fool any contempt or to the wicked any blame. Everything 
must be all the same in the subliminal self. If this self is wiser, 
better, and more enduring than our conscious selfhood, why does 
it not do something to live up to its reputation as prophet, seer, 
and general wiseacre ? 

If the subliminal self be a real entity it presents a striking 
anomaly in the evolution of organisms. It represents a reversal 
of the whole course of vital and psychical evolution. The evolu- 
tion of animal behavior has been in the direction of increasing 
control by intelligent consciousness. And the evolution of con- 
sciousness has been in the direction of purposive integration of the 
elements of experience and behavior under the control of the in- 
tellect. Any theory of personality which would yield control to 

T C/. W. McDougall, Articles on " Hypnotism ' ' and "The Subliminal 
Self," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition. 



346 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the subconscious is virtually a demand that we reverse the course 
of evolution and dethrone the intellect or reason from the govern- 
ing and directing place in the conduct of life. The fact that this 
proposal falls in with many irrationalistic tendencies in our social 
life to-day does not recommend it to me the more strongly. The 
conservation of culture I hold to be bound up with the leadership 
of reason. 8 

The entire evolution of psychical life has been in the direction 
of greater mental and rational integration. And we are asked 
to believe that persons who suffer frequent lapses from this ra- 
tional integration and control are under the guidance of a higher 
wisdom, just as savages believed the insane to be inspired. We 
are asked to believe that the silly inanities of the automatic writer, 
the fairy land and topsy-turvy dom of dreams, the "spiritual" 
orgies of neurotics, and so forth, are witnesses to the true nature 
of the self! 

Even an absolute self could be known to me only in two ways ; 
either through its direct intercourse with my conscious and reflec- 
tive life, or by my inferring it as a hypothesis which harmonizes 
and justifies my conception of reality as a whole with special 
reference to the meaning of human life. It is a' piece of thoroughly 
unscientific mysticism to talk of tapping the subconscious in order 
to get into contact with the absolute mind. Such a procedure is 
like going into a dark cellar to get a look at the sun. Compared 
with our finite personalities, an absolute mind must be an intense 
and concentrated intuitive consciousness, a super-personality. 

Whatever does not enter into, and is not fused with the con- 
scious selfhood of man we may consistently relegate to the realm 
of the organic or physiological life. Whatever is wholly and per- 
sistently unconscious in the psychophysical field properly belongs 
to the bodily side of the self. 

One must beware of introducing surreptitiously into a con- 
sideration of the empirical nature of the individual a metaphys- 
ical doctrine which has been fashioned to account for the inters 
relationships of mind and body in terms of a panpsychistic meta- 



8 Since these paragraphs were written there has been a great increase 
in this tendency, due to the psychic strain, anguish and bereavement wrought 
by the World War. One may sympathize deeply with the mental distress of 
millions; but that is not a good reason for losing one's head over spiritualism 
and telepathy. 



THE SUBCONSCIOUS 347 

physics. The problem of the relation between the unity of the 
self and the facts of growth, alteration, and aberration in the 
empirical psychophysical life is rendered n® whit less mysterious 
by changing the terms from those of body and mind into those 
of conscious self and subconscious self. Indeed, I think the prob- 
lem is thereby hopelessly complicated and confused. I may be- 
lieve that the physical order does not exist in absolute independ- 
ence of mind and purpose, and that in personality is to be found 
the best key to the meaning of the world process ; but such a belief 
need not, and should not, be based on the hypothesis of the sub- 
liminal self. 

The subconscious nuances, the various normal and abnormal 
complexities, of selfhood, must not blind us to these cardinal 
facts: 1. Personality is a continuous principle of conscious and 
growing organization of psychophysical impulsions; spiritual as 
well as bio tic. 2. The key to the practical growth and the knowl- 
edge of personality is to be found, not in the unconscious, but in 
the clearest and fullest exercise of reflection and rational willing. 
We know the rudiments of personality in our awareness of our 
various impulsions as constituent members of our selfhood. The 
more persistently we purpose and live in the light of intelligence 
the more fully do we become, and know ourselves as becoming, 
personalities, 



CHAPTEE XXVI 

MULTIPLE PEESONALITY 

There is another class of facts which seem to militate against 
the belief in a personal unity of consciousness. These are the 
pathological facts of diseased and disintegrated personalities; of 
lapse of the sense of individual identity for considerable periods ; 
of alternating selves which may exist contemporaneously in the 
same individual body ; and of successive selves likewise inhabiting 
the same body in succeeding intervals of time. 

Of these phenomena of diseased selfhood there are a number 
of classic and well-known cases. Such are Professor Binet's 
Leonie, with her two additional individual characters which dif- 
fered from her ordinary selfhood, and could be induced by sug- 
gestion and hypnosis; Professor Janet's Felida, and Dr. Weir 
Mitchell's Mary Reynolds; more recently, Dr. Morton Prince's 
Miss Beauchamp, who, he states, manifested during the years 
in which he studied her case, four well-marked and separate selves, 
B I, B II, B III, B IV; with, at times, still other minor variants. 
These selves oscillated in their control of Miss Beauchamp's body 
and actions. Although mutually hostile they did not, for the most 
part, know, without the intervention of perceptive symbols, what 
one another felt and did. In other words, each appeared to be 
a private self. They communicated with one another by letter. 
At times, two of them struggled for the mastery. Sometimes the 
fight was three-cornered. And one of them "Sally" (B II) 
claimed to have developed the power of direct intuitive knowledge 
of the others. These "selves," as described by Dr. Prince, were 
not only distinctive in character, but conflicting and consciously 
hostile in their attitudes towards one another. This case then is 
a very striking instance of "alternating personality." 

A second type is that of "lapse" and "succession" of person- 
alities. Typical of these are the cases of the Reverend Ansel 
Bourne and the Reverend Thomas C. Hanna, both of whom 
wandered away from their homes and occupations, forgot their 



MULTIPLE PERSONALITY 349 

individual identities, and became, for a time, other selves with 
somewhat different names and other occupations. 1 

More extreme instances of the lapse of personal identity are 
furnished by the permanent aberrations of insane persons who 
have believed themselves to be, for instance, Jesus Christ, Julius 
Caesar, or Queen Victoria, or even a Ley den jar charged with 
electricity. 

If the actual self be thus subject to dissociation, aberration, 
and complete loss of the sense of personal identity, can there 
really be a persisting unity in human personality? I hold that 
such cases do not invalidate our theory of personal identity. The 
instances rather enforce, by extreme examples, the principle which 
is substantiated by the normal history of selfhood, when consid- 
ered in relation to its elemental instincts, and emotions. That 
principle is as follows : the empirical self is a complex, imperfect, 
and developing organization of experiences and purposes, which 
depends upon and increases through the activity of the power 
of rational synthesis by which the congenital and modifiable 
psychical elements of life are fused into a more unified and en- 
during system. 

Personality is a dynamic and progressing unity, not a static 
and ready-made unity. Personality is an achievement with many 
grades and stages. The unity of the empirical self is won by 
organizing the physicopsychical elements of individuality. The 
pure or formal ego is the power of synthesis, through which this 
organization is effected. To speak of alternating and successive 
"personalities" is a misnomer, since, when these phenomena of dis- 
eased individuality are present, the self is in very unstable equi- 
librium, and a genuine personality, in the full sense of the term, 
is not in evidence. Special subsystems or clusters of impulses 
and feelings have the upper hand, and the self is in a state of 
disintegration. 

It may be maintained that, in such cases, the individual body 
is associated, either contemporaneously or successively, with 
several distinct "souls" ; and that, in the case of Miss Beauchamp, 
for example, the struggle between B I, B II, B III, and B IV 
was a contest for exclusive possession of this body by the several 
souls. This theory is a modern restatement of the ancient doc- 

1 For the Bourne ease see William James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. i, 
Chap. 10. For the Hanna case see Sidis and Goodhart, Multiple Personality. 



350 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

trine of demoniacal possession. 2 Now, if this hypothesis afforded 
the most probable explanation, one would expect the phenomenon 
to be more frequent with human beings than as matter of fact it 
is. The hypothesis does not fit well the facts of lapse of identity 
or alteration of personality. For many of these cases, such as 
that of Ansel Bourne, show a beclouded, but very evident con- 
tinuity or sameness in the so-called successive selves. If the souls 
are really separate and distinct individualities, it is difficult to 
understand why that separateness and distinctness of individu- 
ality which belongs to several souls should comport with the 
identity or selfsameness of the inhabited body. The great mass 
of the facts of psychophysiology point to the truth of the view 
that the body is an important contributory factor in, the psychical 
life of the individual. Indeed, the terms "soul" and "personality" 
are used in a very loose and vague sense when applied to path- 
ological cases. Finally, the facts are susceptible of a differ- 
ent interpretation ; one more in harmony with the variegated and 
complex character of our normal self-experience, particularly with 
the part which is played in normal life by conflicting feelings 
and impulses. These pathological cases of self-aberration are 
instances in which the power of personal synthesis or organization 
is relatively ineffectual against the disintegrative power of certain 
partial systems or subsystems of feelings and impulsions, which 
have gained an abnormal and overmastering intensity of expres- 
sion at the expense of other factors in the life of the self. 

In Dr. Prince's account of the Beauchamp case he tells about 
his hunt for the real Beauchamp amidst the struggles of B I, 
and B IV and the upsetting interventions of the mischief making 
"Sally" (B II). He outlines the genesis of Sally, and shows how 
she was finally "squeezed out." At first B I the "saint, the 
dignified, patient, self-repressing emotional idealist," seemed to 
be the normal self; then, since B IV the "woman," with her vigo- 
rous self-assertion, seemed the healthier type, he concluded that 
she must be the normal self, and B I must be suppressed. Finally, 
the "real" Miss Beauchamp was formed by the synthesis of B I 
and B IV and the elimination of B II (Sally or the "Devil"). 

Now, in regard to this very interesting case, it seems to me 
that Dr. Prince's own account bears out the view that the normal 

2 This is the view advanced by Dr. William McDougall in his work Body 
and Mind. 



MULTIPLE PERSONALITY 351 

or "real" Miss Beauchamp had never existed at all before the 
synthesis so skillfully and successfully facilitated by his treatment. 
Miss Beauchamp had probably never achieved a relatively stable 
and well-organized selfhood since adolescence. Her life had been 
the theater of an alternating succession of conflicting impulsions. 
The details of her early life are very incomplete but, as given by 
Dr. Prince, they bear out this view. The "Dissociation of a Per- 
sonality" is the story not of the restoration of an older and dis- 
integrated personality, which was once a harmonious and effective 
reality, but rather of the organization, one might almost say the 
creation, of a personality. Miss B. had never been a well-integrated 
personality. Her case was one of arrested development. Her 
emotional-volitional condition was a commingling of childhood, 
adolescence, and maturity. The Sally self was notably that of 
a child. 

This case is a striking illustration of the principle that an 
actual personality is an organization of ideational, affectional, 
anl volitional elements. Her alternating "selves" were composed 
of various fragmentary subsystems of feelings and impulsions, 
which had become so persistent and were so in conflict with one 
another that they could not readily be made to form one harmo- 
nious system or permanent self. In popular usage there may 
be no great harm in calling each of these groups of impulsions 
a self or personality; but in psychology and philosophy such a 
usage is very misleading. A true self exists only when there is 
a coherent and conscious unity and continuity in the individual's 
life and a consequent coherence and continuity in his purposes 
and deeds. 

So-called alternating and conflicting selves are extreme in- 
stances of features that are familiar enough in normal life. The 
actual self is never an entirely fixed and unyielding system of 
affections and conations. It is more or less fluid and plastic. It 
shows a variety of aspects, according to the relations in which it 
operates. No one type of attitude, no single line of action, feel- 
ing or thought, can be said to express the fullness of a normal 
selfhood. A man shows different aspects of his nature or person- 
ality in the family, in business, in society, in church, and at 
play. Very frequently we are surprised when we see the hard- 
headed business man or the sober-minded scholar in his home or 
on an outing. We constantly find it necessary to revise our esti- 



352 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

mates of individual characters. We are quite often surprised at 
the suddenly manifested power in ourselves of emotions, interests, 
and ideas, that we had supposed dead or vanished. There come 
times in the life of every redblooded self, when, under the stress 
of some powerful impulse or emotion, such as anger, fear, love, 
or rivalry, he is not "himself" even as he had supposed himself 
to he from long and intimate acquaintance. Gusts of passion or 
long-forgotten cravings sweep over and sometimes submerge the 
humdrum work-a-day self. 

I have set down these familiar and obvious matters in order 
to enforce the principle that the striking cases of disordered per- 
sonality differ only in degree and persistence from the ordinary 
experiences of the normal self. The empirical self is always a 
more or less unified complex of psychical impulsions. The raw 
materials of selfhood are specific impulses, desires, emotions, per- 
cepts, and images. Those always tend to form some sort of sys- 
tem, whether permanent or temporary. In the cases of diseased 
personality the controlling principle of rational synthesis is not 
effective against the abnormal strength of some subsystem of im- 
pulses. That it is possible to integrate the various elements of 
the biological individual into a coherent unity of purpose, feeling, 
and action, is evidence of the activity of the principle of synthesis 
by which the empirical personality is gradually being formed. 
The most obvious and common feature of these cases of abnormal 
selfhood is the break in the continuity of memory, which is, of 
course, the basis of empirical or conscious self-identity. The 
conditions would seem to indicate a high degree of nervous in- 
stability or disintegration, symptomatic of nerve fatigue and auto- 
intoxication. Explanations of such disintegration in terms of the 
dissociation of neurone systems in the brain are the most plausible 
physiological explanations. 

The abnormalities of personal life do not disprove the func- 
tional activity in the empirical self of that synthetic principle 
which is the source of our feeling of personal identity and the 
power which effects the progressive organization, into a rational 
self, of the variety of feelings and impulses which constitute the 
crude materials of the highest personality. 

There are three distinguishable phases of selfhood: (1) The 
empirical or actual self; this is the concrete and variable, and 
only partially organized, complex of impulsions and emotions, 



MULTIPLE PERSONALITY 353 

purposes and ideas, which make up our everyday experienced and 
observed selfhood. This is the self which others see, but from a 
different angle than we see it from. This self may be further 
analyzed into the social self, into various social selves in fact — 
the business self, the bodily self, the religious self, and so forth. 
Of course, these latter selves are but partial aspects of the total 
empirical self. (2) The formal self or pure ego. This is the 
active and enduring principle of synthesis which organizes the 
empirical elements of selfhood into a unity and forms the prin- 
ciple of continuity on which memory depends. It is consequently 
the basis of the consciousness of personal identity. (3) The ideal 
self. This is the self as developing personality; the as yet but 
imperfectly realized integration of the self's deepest potencies and 
interests. It is the spring of new cognitive, moral, aesthetic and 
religious valuations. This is the purposive and dynamic self, 
the servant and creator of new values. It is the "ideal self" which 
plays such a major role in idealistic metaphysics — in Kant, 
Fichte, Hegel, T. H. Green, Bosanquet, Bradley and Royce. In- 
asmuch as the pure ego is a mere formal abstraction, and the 
empirical ego is a true personality only in the degree in which 
ideals are operative in it, the ideal self is a dynamic entity, a 
field of real possibilities. 

This notion that the ideal self, the possible self, is more 
significantly real than the already attained empirical ego is a 
favorite idea with the great poets, as well as with the other great 
spiritual teachers — with none more so than with Robert Brown- 
ing. I have space for but one citation : 

Not on the vulgar mass 

Called "work," must sentence pass, 

Things done, that took the eye and had the price; 

O'er which, from level stand, 

The low world laid its hand, 

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice; 

But all, the world's coarse thumb 

And finger failed to plumb, 

So passed in making up the main account; 

All instincts immature, 

All purposes unsure, 

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount ; 



354 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 

Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped; 

All I could never be, 

All, men ignored in me, 

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. 

—Rabbi Ben Ezra, 23-25. 



CHAPTEK XXVII 



MIND AND BODY 



One of the fundamental problems in the metaphysics of per- 
sonality is the relation of the individual mind to the body which 
it inhabits. Is the body simply an external tool of the real self, 
a useful but not indispensable adjunct and instrument of the 
true personality ? Or, second, is the body the true reality of which 
the mind is a by-product ? Or, third, is the body simply the phe- 
nomenal expression of the mind, which alone is truly existent ? 
Or, fourth, does the body participate in and contribute to the 
essential nature of the self ? These are the four chief alternatives, 
represented respectively by dualism, materialism, spiritualism or 
mentalism, and psychophysical individualism. 

The common-sense theory of the relation of mind and body 
is qualitatively dualistic and interactionistic. Mind and body 
are thought of as two realities differing in kind, but interacting. 
The mind is the "inside self" which feels, thinks, and strives; 
the body is the "outside self" through which the inner self com- 
municates with the world at large. Common-sense thinking does 
not offer any theory as to how these two diverse realities interact. 
It represents the Cartesian and Lockian dualism become a tradi- 
tion. "Common-sense" always embodies ancient philosophies. 
The common-sense view latently contains both dualistic and 
monistic elements. Animism or hylozoism survives in modern 
popular thinking on this subject. 

I. Dualism 

Dualism holds that mind and body are two disparate and 
separable entities. Each may exist independently of the other. 
There are mindless bodies and bodiless minds. Dualism is based, 
in the first instance, on the patent contrasts between mind and 
body : mind is not extended, cannot be divided, weighed or meas- 

355 



356 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

ured by physical means, knows itself; that is, it is a self-related, 
self-conscious, immaterial unity; body is extended in space, can 
be weighed, measured, and divided ; is not a unity for itself but 
only for another, that is, for a mind. Descartes neatly summed 
up the contrast when he said, "the essence of mind is thought, 
the essence of body is extension." It is noteworthy that Spinoza 
based his doctrine of parallelism on the dualistic theory of Des- 
cartes, conceived as rendering unintelligible and impossible the 
interaction of mind and body. The parallelistic theory has been 
strengthened by the modern doctrine of the absolutely closed and 
self-sufficient character of the physical series of causes and effects 
considered as energy-content. Every occurrence in nature is to 
be explained in terms of the mechanical equivalence of causes and 
effects. Nothing but precisely calculable factors can be admitted 
into the sequences of physical events. The physiological activi- 
ties of the human organism are to be explained in the same way 
as other physical processes. When I move my arm to write this 
sentence the entire movement and its resultants are just parts of 
a mechanical series of transformations of physical energy. My 
body is a peculiarly complicated piece of physical mechanism. In 
it outgo and intake of energy must be exactly equivalent, and 
when outgo begins to increase cumulatively over intake the pro- 
cess of decay and death is already setting in. There is thus no 
place in the sequence of transformations of physical energies for 
the influence of mind. 

The absolutely closed and self-complete character of the me- 
chanical sequence of causes and effects in the human organism 
is held to be a corollary of the principle of the conservation 
of energy. Now, as a working method in physical science, 
this principle means only that, within the limits of any finite 
closed material system, the energy content or sum total of 
energy remains constant through all the qualitative transforma- 
tions of energy that may take place within the closed system. 
The mechanistic conception of the organism, while undoubtedly 
a most valuable methodological standpoint in the investigation of 
vital processes, has not been fully established as the whole story 
about life. But even though it were established, it would not 
follow that the physical systems which constitute human bodies 
are absolutely closed mechanical systems, or that they have no 
other meaning than that which belongs to parts of a world mechan- 



MIND AND BODY 357 

ism. If the body is a machine, it does not follow that the mind 
may not direct the machine. The validity of the principle of the 
conservation of energy within the limits of conventionally closed 
physical systems of energy, that is, of such systems considered in 
abstraction from minds, is not a sufficient warrant for extending 
the application of this principle to the concrete totality of the 
real universe, which includes minds and their operations. The 
physicist abstracts from the concrete world the activities of minds, 
and makes the remainder the sole object of his investigations. 

The same amount of energy, measured in terms of physical 
units, may have very different psychical values. The same 
amount of energy, for example, that goes into the writing of this 
chapter would, if expended in the fall of a brick on my head, 
have, I fondly believe, a very diminished result in terms of human 
value. The characteristic culture-feature of applied science, in- 
dustry, and the fine arts, is that in these activities the human 
mind does direct the course of physical energy to realize enhanced 
psychical values, hedonic, ethical, aesthetic, etc. This power of 
guidance is the source of the technical progress that makes civi- 
lization possible. It is in its power to direct physical energies 
into channels that sustain the fruition of human values, that the 
mind's creative capacity is seen. This constitutes mind's unique- 
ness in the order of nature. The conservation of physical energy 
may be the fundamental condition of its direction and application 
by mind. 

It may be objected that this directivity, by which psychical 
values are created and conserved, means the application of energy ; 
that this energy of direction must either be drawn from the 
constant sum of physical energy in the natural order, or be an 
injection ab extra of energy by the mind into the physical system ; 
and that the latter hypothesis is both inconceivable and contra- 
dictory to the principle of the conservation of energy, while the 
former hypothesis simply makes the mind an incalculable con- 
centration of physical energy. If mind be not a form of physical 
energy then it cannot influence the course of physical energy. It 
takes energy to alter the direction of energy. The question of 
the conceivability or imaginability of the influence of mind on 
body I shall discuss later. As to the question of fact, I hold that 
there is no fact which has better empirical attestation than the 
reciprocal influence of mind and body. In health and disease, in 



358 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

action and repose, the fact is abundantly and continuously ex- 
perienced. The scientist or philosopher who denies the fact, in 
the interest of a theory, is so wedded to his own prejudices dressed 
up as a 'priori conceptions that he is blind to the plain facts of 
human experience. To say that mental guidance of bodily en- 
ergies contradicts the law of the conservation of energy is to beg 
the whole question; it is to assume offhand that the ultimate 
system of things in its totality is a closed mechanical system. It 
is to assume that the physical universe is a self-existent whole, 
and that every so-called psychophysical organism is nothing but 
a finite physical machine within the absolute or world machine. 

It is in accordance with the apparent facts to say that the 
mind is not a form of physical energy; but that it is a unique 
kind of activity, which can direct physical energies without add- 
ing to or subtracting from the quantities of these. The human 
values of the natural process which are extracted, or created, if 
you like the term better, by mind are not measurable by physical 
standards. Therefore, their appearance, maintenance and aug- 
mentation need make no difference at all in the calculable rela- 
tions of physical processes. But the appearance, maintenance, 
and augmentation of these psychical values makes all the differ- 
ence in the world in the humanistic meanings of the sum of 
things. The real world is one in which the laws of behavior of 
physical things are, in part, at least, subservient to the realization 
of psychical values. Any world concept short of this is incom- 
plete and inadequate. 

But is it not inconceivable that an unextended, imponderable, 
immeasurable entity should be able to influence a system of ex- 
tended, ponderable, and measurable particles, and vice versa? 
If by "inconceivability" be meant that we cannot form a satis- 
factory picture or image of the process in question that is true 
but inconclusive. One cannot form an adequate picture of how 
a living embryo carries in itself the predetermination of the 
structures and functions of a developed organism! One cannot 
form an adequate picture of how gravitational attraction acts, or 
of how radioactive matter goes through all its transformations, or 
even of how one atom or electron acts on another ! Our scientific 
theories and explanations consist, to a very large extent, in the 
interpolation of crude and inadequate pictures or images, to ac- 
count for the intermediate or imperceptible steps in processes 



MIND AND BODY 359 

which, taken in the rough or as wholes, are unquestionable and 
familiar. Our scientific, no less than our popular, thinking is 
dominated by spatial metaphors. 

II. Psychophysical Parallelism 

The difficulty of imagining in detail how mind and body can 
interact, together with the assumption of the closed and self- 
sufficient character of the physical series or sequences of causes 
and effects, have led to the revival and extension of the theory of 
psychophysical parallelism, which was first enunciated by Spinoza. 
This theory is based on an extreme ontological dualism or quali- 
tative opposition of mind and body. It seemed a simple and 
consistent way out of the difficulties of Cartesian dualism. And, 
in its revised and extended forms to-day, it seems to square with 
the doctrine of the conservation of energy; and to fit in, as no 
other theory does, with the facts and theories of neural physiology 
and psychophysics. 

As it has been formulated in recent times the theory of psycho- 
physical parallelism has confused two, and sometimes three, very 
different conceptions. It may be taken in the restricted sense 
of psychoneural parallelism, the wider sense of psychophysiolog- 
ical parallelism, or in the widest sense of complete psychophysical 
parallelism. When the psychologist says that to every mental 
process there corresponds a nerve process ("no psychosis without 
neurosis"), he is employing the conception of psychoneural paral- 
lelism. It is perhaps true that no mental processes do take place 
without corresponding nerve processes of some sort. The evidence 
for this assumption is very strong, certainly strong enough to 
make it a good working hypothesis in psychology. But a general 
correspondence of conscious processes with certain complex neural 
processes does not necessarily exclude interdependence. And 
there is no conclusive evidence that a mental process corresponds 
to every nerve process. Indeed, very little is known about the 
character of the elementary nerve processes. If recognitive mem- 
ory and the selective utilization of previous experiences to effect 
novel combinations are signs of the presence of mind, then there 
are many indications that a great part of neural activity is un- 
accompanied by conscious mental processes. In man, and still 
more in animals, a large part of the physiological activities are 



360 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

carried on without any accompanying consciousness. Elaborate 
activities of metabolism, circulation, growth and decay take place 
without any awareness thereof. 

The mind seems to function in dependence on the central 
nervous system. In the ascending scale of complexity of animal 
organization, there is a correspondence between the degree of 
organization of the nervous system and its mass relatively to the 
mass of the entire organism, and the degree of mental activity. 
The more complex and highly integrated the central nervous sys- 
tem the richer and more unified and continuous the activity of 
consciousness. The facts of comparative physiology and compar- 
ative psychology point to a specific integration of the nervous 
system as the condition for the functioning of mind in its per- 
ceptual and volitional relations to the physical world. The evi- 
dence is thus very strong for a limited psychoneural correspond- 
ence. But this correspondence cannot be carried out in minute 
detail. It is not a perfect parallelism. It is at present supposed 
that the neurone is the unit of nervous structure and activity, but 
this theory may be supplanted at any moment by another. There 
seems to be an integration of elemental nerve processes in the cen- 
tral nervous system. But, as a matter of fact, current theories 
as to the elementary neural activities and their modes of integra- 
tion are based on a supposed analogy between them and the 
processes of consciousness. Inasmuch as more is known in regard 
to the character of conscious processes than of cortical processes, 
there is no warrant for making speculative analogies the basis 
for a theory of psychoneural parallelism which is not in accord 
with the empirical nature of consciousness itself. The fact that 
nerve activity must reach a specific degree of complication and 
integration before such a conscious process as perception ensues 
is a strong argument against a complete psychoneural paral- 
lelism. 1 

Mental elements, such as sensations, feeling-impulses, per- 
cepts, and memory images, do not really exist apart from the in- 
tegrated mind or empirical unity of consciousness, which we 
analyze into these artefacts. And there appears to be nothing 
in the shape of an elementary nerve process that can be regarded 

1 The facts in this connection are formulated in the psychophysical law or 
Weber-Wechner law of the relation of stimulus to sensation. See Titchener, 
Experimental Psychology, Vol. II, Introduction, etc. 



MIND AND BODY 361 

as strictly parallel to the activity of attentive self-consciousness. 
Precisely the most significant feature of mental series is its re- 
flective or double character. We have not only mental series but 
awareness thereof as a series, not only consciousness but self- 
consciousness. Let us assume, for the purposes of illustration, 
that, by the use of a hyper-microscope and a series of mirrors, 2 
a man might perceive his own brain states and imagine him per- 
ceiving the brain state parallel to his perception of his own brain 
state. Then parallelism lands one in the absurdity of an infinite 
series in which perception forever chases in vain its partner brain 
state. My awareness of the perception of my own brain state, 
as parallel to the state of consciousness which perceives it, would 
involve, in the instant of the perception of the parallel brain state, 
another brain state parallel to the perception of the parallelism 
between my previous brain state and the brain state itself. Hence, 
if parallelism were literally true there could be no such thing under 
any conditions as a perception of parallelism, and self-conscious- 
ness and continuous memory would be inconceivable. 

There is a general correspondence between the integration of 
the central nervous system and the unity of the mind. "The inte- 
grating power of the nervous system has in fact in fhe higher ani- 
mals, more than in the lower, constructed from a mere collection of 
organs and segments, a functional unity, an individual of more 
perfected solidarity." 3 This functional unity corresponds with 
the psychic unity. From the biological standpoint, the cerebrum 
may be regarded as the ganglion of the distance-receptors, and 
consciousness as an adjunct to the centers which exercise control 
over reflexes. Consciousness is a center of indetermination which 
intervenes in reflex activities to enable the organism to adjust 
itself to the environment, by reactions involving factors of greatly 
increased range in space and time. In the technical language of 
the physiologist, consciousness controls the coordination of "dis- 
tance receptors" and "consummatory reactions." The cerebrum 
is the immediate instrument of this control and hence the imme- 
diate basis of consciousness. But this control function of con- 
sciousness makes it a difficult and artificial theory, even from a 



2 This illustration was suggested to me by a similar one employed from a 

different standpoint by Professor C. A. Strong in Why the Mind Has a Body. 

•C. S. Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, p. 353. 



362 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

purely biological standpoint, to regard the processes of mind as 
inert concomitants of cerebral functions, as a series of episodical 
and mysterious illuminations which, accompanying cerebral activi- 
ties, yet neither affect these in any way nor are affected by them. 
From the standpoint of a strict psychoneural parallelism mind 
or consciousness is both otiose and inexplicable. 

Psychophysiological parallelism would mean that to every sort 
of physiological functioning there is a corresponding mental 
process. The arguments which tell against a literal and detailed 
psychoneural parallelism tell with even greater force against this 
form. If mental functioning be conditioned by a central nervous 
system it follows that there can be no mind where there is not even 
a rudimentary nervous system. Of course it is possible that proto- 
zoans and even plants have minds. They do not seem to show 
clear signs of true memory or of conscious adaptation. They may 
possess evanescent sentience like the body monads of Leibniz. 
Possibly intelligence or mind is coextensive with life. Possibly 
the vital principle is identical with the psychical principle ; I do 
not see how one can come to a definite conclusion on this point. 
The mind may be the more clearly conscious and highly organized 
form of the rudimentary intelligence which is the organizing 
principle of life ; or it may be a qualitatively different entity. I 
incline to the latter view. 

The third form of parallelism, psychophysical parallelism, in 
the strict sense, is hylopsychism or panpsychism — all matter is 
"besouled." It would require the assumption of atoms of mind- 
stuff, corresponding with the ultimate units of matter or energy. 
It, and indeed all forms of strict parallelism, imply that the more 
complex and higher forms of mind are made by the aggregation 
or compounding of discrete mental particles; and the principles 
of aggregation, in the last analysis, are conceived on the analogy 
of the arrangement of mass particles in spatial configurations. 
But the unity of a mind and its continuity are of a different order 
from any series of merely physical configurations. A mind is not 
a mosaic of atoms of mind-stuff. Indeed parallelism is only a trans- 
itional hypothesis. When thought out it lands in either — (a.) 
materialism or epiphenomenalism ; or (b) Berkeleyan idealism, 
spiritualism or mentalism (the doctrine that only minds are real) ; 
or (c) agnostic monism, the doctrine of the unknown third; 
namely, that the physical and mental in series are diverse mani- 






MIND AND BODY 363 

festations of one unknown reality, which is neither the sum of 
mind and body nor identical with the character of either when 
taken by itself. 

(a) Materialism regards mind as a product of physiological 
activities — an epiphenomenon or reflection thrown up by certain 
highly complicated forms of physicochemical process. Material- 
ism does not square with the plain facts of experience, and it con- 
flicts with fundamental principles of the theory of knowledge. 
As we have before argued, it is just as onesided an error to affirm 
the independent existence of a physical world out of all relation 
to experience and experiencers, but which causes these to exist, as 
it is to affirm the existence of minds out of all relation to a physical 
worlds We can know nothing of the existence or nature of a world 
supposed to be out of all relation to percipients. The real objects 
of our physical experience consist of the socially accessible or 
public realm of perceptions, actual and possible. The real physical 
world is not the system of scientific symbols devised by the scien- 
tific imagination to facilitate more exact description and calcula- 
tion of certain highly general aspects of the perceived physical 
order. The primary reality of the world is not to be found in 
atoms, electrons, and ether, but in the system of actual and possible 
public experience. In this system there are two constant factors 
— neither of which is reducible to the other — the percipients for 
whose perceiving and relating activities the world exists as a public 
realm, and the perceived and understood qualities of this world. 
The real world is a system of experiences in relation, which in- 
volves and includes experiencers. The world-whole is an organized 
totality of objects of awareness and centers of awareness. 

Let it be admitted, as a plausible hypothesis, that the invari- 
able condition of conscious functioning is a specific complex of 
physicochemical activities. Let it be further admitted that spe- 
cific variations in the processes of consciousness may be invariably 
conditioned by specific chemical differences. Let it be admitted 
that, if our knowledge were only complete enough, the physical 
differences between Shakespeare and the grave-digger in Hamlet 
would be found to be strictly correlated with the mental differ- 
ences. It does not follow that physicochemical forces are the sole 
and ultimate reality, and that they suffice to explain mind. To 
assert such a consequence would be to ignore the psychical and 
spiritual values which, as data of immediate experience, are asso- 



364 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

ciated with these specific physical differences. The physico- 
chemical conditions of conscious and rational activity are unique 
conditions, just because of this association. The logic of the 
argument, which would ignore the psychical values associated with 
certain specific physical activities, is just as had logic as that which 
would deny that psychical processes are conditioned by certain 
physical processes. The former are conditioned by the latter, but 
there is no good evidence that they are caused by these alone. The 
adequate view is one that takes experience in its organic, or rather 
superorganic, totality. The key to the interpretation of experience 
as a whole lies just in the definite actualities of intelligent appre- 
hension and control of physical energies for the production and 
maintenance of human values ; this key is found and used in the 
harvest of beauty, order, social progress and individual self-fulfill- 
ment through science, morals, art and personal relations which 
human cultural activity yields. The intellectual, moral and 
aesthetic values, distilled from nature by mind, are indubitable 
facts of experience. A world which can and does yield these values 
is much more than a merely material system. The so-called 
opposition between facts and values is really a conflict between 
special spheres of values; for example, between the values of a 
mechanico-causal explanation and those of a humanistic interpre- 
tation of nature. But these conflicts are internal to the whole 
realm of f actual-worthful experience. All fact has value of some 
sort, and all values must belong to the total world of fact. 

Selves are implicated in the physical order. But just as truly 
is the physical order implicated in the lives of selves. It would 
not be misleading to say that selves are the offspring of the physical 
order, provided this statement be supplemented by the converse 
one that the whole meaning of the physical order and of knowledge 
thereof includes, as its most significant feature, the formation and 
fruition of psychical individuality. The increasing adequacy of 
our knowledge of nature is the increasing insight into the rich and 
vast individuality of a universe which at its upper level is a 
systematic and living whole of finite and progressing individuals. 
Man, as intelligent, self-directing individuality, is truly the micro- 
cosm. An individual is a maximum unity of diverse and comple- 
mentary qualities or powers. The world is a psychophysical 
organization; and the destiny of man, as a psychophysical indi- 
vidual, is by knowledge and action consciously to unite himself 



MIND AND BODY 365 

with the world, and in so doing, at once to reflect the cosmos in his 
own being and to expand and harmonize that being. Selves are 
centers in which the meaning of the whole process of nature 
becomes consciously concentrated. The total process of nature 
thus wins a multitudinous awareness and enhancement. Its sig- 
nificance is revealed and enriched by its multiplication in new 
individuated centers of value. The world of selves is a world of 
psychophysical individualities, in which one can read the prevail- 
ing tendency and meaning of nature. 

(b) A second way of escape from dualistic parallelism is 
offered by that form of spiritualism or idealism so persuasively 
expounded by Berkeley. I prefer to call this doctrine "mental- 
ism" or "idealism," since it assumes that only mental processes 
are real. I shall not enter here into an extended critique of men- 
talism. In Book I, I have already discussed some of its weaknesses. 
The following is a summary of objections to it: (1) If all bodies 
are only the effects of the direct action of the Divine Spirit on 
finite spirits, on what grounds can one account for the peculiar 
warmth and intimacy of the feel of his own body in contrast with 
all other bodies ? (2) What is the relation between my spirit or 
yours and the Divine Spirit ? Are we but thoughts in the Divine 
Mind? (3) Whence arises the contrast between my mind and 
my body and between my mind and all other bodies, if all bodies 
are but impressions made on my mind by the Divine Mind ? (4) 
If bodies have no sort of independent existence why should it be 
necessary for me to infer your mental existence and behavior from 
a group of sense qualities impressed on my mind by God, but 
which, nevertheless, are in many cases very equivocal in the clews 
that they give me to your mental attitudes? (5) What is the 
relation between your body as it exists for you and as it exists for 
me ? It cannot be the same body, since for you it is the sensory 
complex caused in your mind by God and for me the quite dif- 
ferent sensory complex caused by God in my mind? In brief, 
Berkeleyan idealism raises more difficulties than it solves. 

(c) The third ontological hypothesis, agnostic monism, which 
asserts that mind and body are the double aspects under which the 
unknown substance of things is manifested, fails to explain in any 
fashion the concrete relations of mind and body. To say that mind 
and body are parallel manifestations of an unknown third some- 
thing is to take refuge in a mystery and an abstraction. It is 



$66 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

simply to re-assert that mind and body are parallel and that the 
parallelism is the expression of something — we know not what. 



III. Psychophysical Individualism 

The element of truth which is expressed badly in the "double 
aspect" or "unknown third" doctrine of mind and body is the 
correlativity or functional interdependence of mind and body, A 
mind is a different and higher kind of unity than a body, never- 
theless there is a functional interdependence between them. What- 
ever physiological complex be the indispensable basis of mental 
functioning, in our empirical order, whether it be a neurone sys- 
tem or, in the case of more rudimentary minds, a simpler system, 
the mind and its bodily basis, although distinct, are inseparable. 
There are no empirical grounds, barring for the present the con- 
sideration of spiritistic phenomena, which give us the least inkling 
as to how a mind may function apart from a body. On the other 
hand a physiological system which is functionally coordinated 
with a mind is ipso facto different in character and results from 
one which is not thus coordinated. Whatsoever physiological 
system may be immediately organic to a mental self is qualified 
by that organicity. Therefore, it is quite as incorrect to say that 
the sole causes of mental activity are to be found in the chemical 
processes of the body, as it is to say that the mind can function 
without a body at all. The actual self is a psychophysical indi- 
vidual, in which mental action is conditioned by, and conditions, 
bodily action. Some bodily processes seem to give rise solely to 
other bodily processes; but some bodily processes plus mental 
processes give rise to other mental processes plus further bodily 
processes. An organism and a mind, which is functionally co- 
ordinate with it, together constitute a specific or unique kind of 
machine which I call a psychophysical individual. The interaction 
of mind and body cannot be of the simple type of mechanico-causal 
interaction. There are no measurable constants or units of mental 
energy; there are no mechanical equivalents for thoughts, pur- 
poses, and ideals. Hence, the interaction of mind and body must 
be that of reciprocating factors in a single system — an individu- 
ality. We have seen that in organisms the sum total of their vital 
processes seem to be the expression of what I have called the 
principle of organic individuation, the vital principle. Whether 



MIND AND BODY 367 

the latter principle is to be identified with the individuality of 
mind I do not know. Certainly the most concrete, rich and unified 
type of individuality, of which we have experience, is the human 
individual which is psychophysical. In fact, all our concepts of 
individuality, and their application to lower, and conceivably to 
higher, individuals than man, are based on either observed or 
imagined analogies between the objects to which these concepts are 
applied and human individuality. The reflective analysis and the 
synthetic extension of self -intuition by the human individual is the 
basis of all our applications of the concept of the individual, 
whether it be to electrons, atoms, molecules, organisms or to super- 
men, angels and God. 

The individuation of the bodily organism is the basis for the 
progressive realization of the mind's identity-in-difference or indi- 
vidual unity. Whether or not there be organisms devoid of senti- 
ent souls, the unity of the organism represents, in its successive 
ascents towards more complex individuality, the instrumentality 
by which the mind finds itself in commerce with the world in its 
work of self-organization. Teleological interdependence does not 
simply supervene upon mechanism. The latter is everywhere 
present and subordinate to the realization of psychical values. 
This is what I mean by teleology — that, as a matter of fact and 
principle, reality is a living system in which values are constantly 
being produced and conserved. In the functional unity of mind 
and body we find an empirical example of individual teleological 
system. 

The real personality is not identical with the body, nor even 
with the central nervous system. But the personality is dependent, 
for the sensory materials of its inner life, and for its modes of 
interaction with the external or physical order, upon the function- 
ing of the nervous system. Probably the nervous system and the 
whole body are but highly complicated physicochemical systems 
for the transformation of the more general forms of physical 
energy into physiological energy. 

The mind is not a physical substance, but it is conditioned in 
its operations by its association with a physical complex. Mind 
is not extended in space in the mathematical sense, but it is local- 
ized in and holds transactions with the world through a spatial 
complex. The deepest source of the difficulty in accepting psycho- 
physical interaction lies, as has been effectively shown by Bergson 



368 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

in his brilliant work Mature et Memovre, in the artificial and 
overdrawn contrast between body as extended in space and mind 
as unextended, which found its first clear statement in the 
Cartesian philosophy, but which has its roots deep in man's 
practical need of isolating and analyzing matter in order to act 
upon it. But actual bodies are not purely homogeneous spatial 
magnitudes. They are heterogeneous or qualitatively diverse 
dynamic complexes. They have finite extensity and finite divisi- 
bility. They are specific individuals or clusters of energy-centers. 
Pure homogeneous geometrical extension is an intellectual abstrac- 
tion from the concrete space world. Actual bodies are concrete 
extensities. They are localized dynamic systems of action and 
reaction in the total system of forces which constitutes the physical 
world. 

Physics is gradually establishing, on surer foundations, the 
view that mass and spatial magnitude are phenomena of centers of 
activity. Physical reality is a vast system of motions going on at 
an indefinite variety of rates, and these motions are the expres- 
sions of the dynamic interrelations of centers of activity. "Whether 
or not all energy, mass and inertia can be stated in terms of elec- 
tron charges, certainly the triumph of the atomic theory of 
electricity has brought increasing evidence for the dynamic theory 
of matter. Inertia or impenetrability is the most fundamental 
property of matter. The inertia of an electrically charged cor- 
puscle appears to be due to its motion in an electromagnetic field, 
and this suggests strongly the theory that the whole of the inertia 
or mass of bodies may be due to electricity. "We regard the atom 
as built up of units of negative electricity and an equal number 
of units of positive electricity." "Mass changes with electric 
charge, for example, when a single particle moves in a magnetic 
field the mass in the region round about changes. Tubes of force 
carry ether and ether has mass. The electric particle, when it 
moves, carries along with it its lines of force which grip the ether 
and carry some of it along. When an electric particle is moved 
the mass of ether has to be moved and the apparent mass of the 
particle is increased. The mass of the electrical particle is 
resident in every part of space reached by its lines of force. The 
electrical body may be said to extend to an infinite distance." 
"Wherever there is potential energy there is mass." "We have 
confined our attention in this article to the view that the constitu- 



MIND AND BODY 369 

tion of matter is electrical ; we have done so because this view is 
more closely in touch with experiment than any other yet ad- 
vanced. The units of which matter is built up have been isolated 
and detected in the laboratory, and we may hope to discover more 
and more of their properties." 4 The electric theory of matter 
postulates two factors to explain matter in the ordinary sense. 
These are discrete units, the electrons ; and a continuous medium, 
the all-pervading ether, an immensely tenuous, but strong and 
elastic fluid, capable of sustaining great variations of tension or 
stress and strain. From this standpoint the basis of difference 
in our sensuous matter are variations in the tension of the ether ; 
in other words, variations of stress and strain, and, consequently, 
of motions in the ether. 5 Lodge surmises that the electron may be 
a tension in the ether. I have cited this theory, both because it is 
the most plausible theory of matter at the present time, and be- 
cause it illustrates two points fundamental to a philosophy of 
nature: (1) that any theory of the physical world, to be satis- 
factory, must include both discreteness and continuity. Atoms 
and electrons must have a medium ; whether this medium be called 
ether of space, or space itself, it must be something continuous. 
The interaction of things across nothing is unintelligible. If 
matter have a granular structure, then there must be a continuous 
medium in which these granules interact. There must be lines 
and fields of force that irradiate in all directions from them. 
(2) The electrical theory of matter, reducing, as it does, the 
phenomena of mass or inertia and weight to stresses and strains or 
motions and tensions in a universal medium, furnishes a powerful 
support, from the field of physical research, for the view that the 
physical world as empirical reality is the manifestation of a system 
of centers of activity. 

In the present connection I desire to emphasize the following 
points: (1) Body is to be conceived in terms of activity. It is 
a complex of dynamic centers. (2) Actual bodies have concrete 
extensities. Extensity in this sense is the expression of tension or 
physical activity. Homogeneous and infinitely divisible space is 



4 Sir J. J. Thompson, article " Matter,' ' Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Ed., 
Volume xvii. See also F. Soddy, Matter and Energy; J. J. Thomson, Elec- 
tricity and Matter; and E. Eutherford, Radio-active Transformations. 

5 Sir Oliver Lodge, The Ether of Space, especially Chap. 8, " Ether and 
Matter. ' ' 



370 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

a conceptual or ideal construction relative to the purposes of 
geometry and mechanics. Actual physical space is the order of 
inter-relations of simultaneously existing, heterogeneous, centers 
of activity. (3) Hence bodies are not infinitely divisible. They 
must consist of ultimate centers of activity. (4) All bodies are 
elements in the total continuum of physical reality, which is a vast 
system of tensions and motions. Motion is detention, that is, 
release of a tension. Concrete or real space means the coexistence 
and interrelation of centers of activity or dynamic and mobile 
elements. 

If it is misleading to define body in terms of inert and homo- 
geneous space, it is equally misleading to say that mind is unex- 
tended. Mind is not static extension, but neither is body. And 
mental processes are not nonspatial but trans-spatial. It is time 
that philosophy emancipated itself from the naive distinction be- 
tween matter and spirit in terms of the contrast between the 
extended and the unextended. This is a heritage from Greek and 
mediaeval thought that we can well dispense with. Visual and 
tactual percepts obviously have extensity. Auditory, olfactory, 
and other forms of sensation, likewise have extensity or bigness. 
Moreover it seems to me that affections and emotions likewise have 
location and extensity. Some are pervasive and spread all over 
the body. Others are narrowly localized, sharp, penetrating, and 
so forth. Is the mind, then, which is the center of reference for all 
these forms of awareness, nonspatial ? Clearly, I think, the mind 
is in the body. It is the conscious unifier and center of tension 
of bodily experience. Just what part of the body it commonly 
inhabits I am not sure. It seems to be able to expand and pervade 
large parts of the whole, and to gather and condense itself into 
narrower compass. With the ideal or higher forms of thought- 
activity and sentiment we seem to be in the presence of purely 
unextended processes. A concept, a judgment concerning abstruse 
matters such as the present problem, or a clearly formulated pur- 
pose, is a maximum concentration and unification of mental 
activity. But even such activities as these are associated with a 
concretely extended body which is in relation to other extensive 
realities. A purpose or a plan of action are obviously concerned 
with the relations of the individual organism to contemporaneously 
existing elements of spatial reality. Such thought activities con- 
dense the past with reference to the future, but this condensation 



MIND AND BODY 371 

implies coexistence and interrelation or extensity. Even such 
"spiritual" processes as an aesthetic emotion, a moral ideal, a 
religions aspiration, or a metaphysical speculation, involve the 
relation of the mind to coexisting realities which have relative 
mutual independence. Mind, as a center of concentration and 
awareness of relationships, has a power of controlling and pene- 
trating, of condensing and redirecting, the extensity-factors or 
spatial tensions of its physical environment to such a degree that 
we may rightly say that mind is a trans-spatial center of action. 
Functioning in space it can become, in increasing measure, the 
master of space. 

There is then, an immaterial, dynamic principle in the human 
self. Consciousness is not a form of physical energy ; but it is at 
once the immediate revelation of a unique kind of energy, the 
energy of thought ; and the intermediate revelation of other forms 
of energy by virtue of being a focal center of awareness, selection, 
rearrangement, and chosen reaction. The energy of mind is ex- 
pressed in intellection and volition. These cannot really be sep- 
arated, since volition involves intellection and intellection is the 
activity of the mind in selecting, combining and valuing the 
materials of experience. Thus the specific character of the energy 
of the mind is most adequately revealed in the rational activity 
of synthesis and analysis and in the forms of reflective valuation 
which determine choice. Mind energy, or spiritual activity, is 
associated with a physical machine, the body, through which it 
receives influences from, and reacts upon, its environment. Thus 
the mind, although it does not seem to occupy a definite area in 
space, is definitely associated with the spatial order in which it 
carries on transactions. The mind is the soul of a dynamic con- 
figuration in space. It is trans-spatial, not nonspatial. Similarly 
the mind, as we shall see more fully later on, is not nontemporal, 
but transtemporal. It endures through time. 

Where there is no recognitive memory and selective choice, the 
successive phases of physical motion are mere links in an endless 
chain. One configuration dies away blindly into its successor. It 
is through selective memory that the past lives in the present, not 
as fatally determining it, but as reconstructed and employed by 
the active mind to illumine the present, and thus to aid in the 
conscious direction of activity to fashion the future. Just as there 
is no sharp break between past and present, so there is no sharp 



372 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

break between present and future. The present is the future in 
the making. Memory is the unifying function which enables the 
individual in the present to control the future by the utilization 
of the past in the present. A being devoid of memory can have 
the continuity only of a succession of stages, in which the earlier 
always completely determine the later. Its moving spring is a 
vis a tergo, that is, a physical force. A being with memory, 
selectivity and reflection, by transcending its immediate present, 
or rather by expanding and transfusing that present from the past, 
is able to emancipate itself from the vis a tergo. Its present grows 
in content and meaning, and thus its future, as this becomes 
present, ceases to be the mere consequence of its past. A being 
without memory lives only in space although it exists in time. 6 
Temporal relations are for it nonexistent. It cannot transcend the 
immediate now, and hence, for it there is no now, since a now 
has meaning only by contrast with a then and a shall-be. A being 
with memory transcends mere spatial relationships. It becomes 
a temporal-historical self-determining being. Memory-conscious- 
ness is the fundamental condition of selfhood and self-determina- 
tion. Space is a function of immediate interaction between indi- 
vidua or monads, but time is a function of memory; time-con- 
sciousness is the condition of the suspension of the blind and in- 
evitable march of temporal predetermination. In this sense to 
know time and change, through memory and reflection, is to 
transcend mere time and change in transcending mere spatial 
coexistence and determination. 

In memory we find, then, as Bergson rightly says, a unique 
function of spirit. 7 It is by virtue of the synthetic or synoptic and 

6 Cf. Leibniz ' body-monads, with appetition but without memory. 

7 My conception of memory is not the same as Bergson 's, however. Mem- 
ory in its highest form I conceive to be the result of the synthetic functioning 
of the self which gives identity and continuity of meaning to sense images. I 
should place much greater stress than he seems to on the function of logical or 
synthetic meaning as the distinctive work of memory, in contrast with mere 
recollection or routine associative recall. 

Significant memory works by the discovery of, and selective emphasis on, 
likenesses and unlikenesses, identities and diversities, whole-part relations, 
causal relations, teleological relations, etc.; in short by the use of logical cate- 
gories. Even in fortuitous chains of association and recall, these logical prin- 
ciples operate. The great differences between random and irrelevant memories, 
on the one hand, and significance or relevant memories, on the other hand, is 
that the latter operate through significant and useful resemblances and dif- 
ferences, whereas the former operate through superficial resemblances and 
differences and thus carry a burden of useless and smothering detail. A good 



MIND AND BODY 373 

selective power manifested in memory that the individual ceases 
to he a mere hlind link in an endless chain of becoming ; that he is 
able to suspend the fatal operation of that vis a tergo by which 
nonmental elements of reality are pushed along, combined and 
broken up, made and unmade. 

The mind is that sort of unique and active center or focus of 
relationships which is able to concentrate and illuminate, with 
memory and awareness, the dynamical relations of elements in the 
system of physical nature to its own immediate organ — the body ; 
and, through this relation to its own organism, to interpret extra- 
bodily relations of physical and other psychophysical centers to 
one another. The mind is also able to be aware of its own aware- 
nesses, that is, to be self-conscious. It has temporal continuity 
and is aware of this continuity. It is a unity and a unifier which 
knows itself as such. Every active center in nature must be in 
some degree a unity and a unifier. Mind is peculiarly so, since, by 
reason of its bodily organ, it becomes the center of a variety and 
range of physical relationships to a degree such as no other thing 
in nature is, and since, by reason of memory and reflection, it 
becomes a reorganizer or redirector of the sequence of physical 
events. The mmd is the organism's consciousness of its actual and 
possible relationships in the dynamic system of reality. Through 
consciousness, the organism becomes in part a controlling and an 
originating center of relationships. Because it can remember and 
bring to bear on the present situation its past recognition of rela- 
tionships within the system of experience, the mind is not tied 
down to the treadmill of a mechanical succession. Through it the 
organism is freed from the bondage of mere reflex and automatic 
activity. 

Placed temporally between the incoming stimuli which signify 
the action of other elements of reality on the organism, and the 
outgoing effectors or motor impulses which signify the reactions 

and useful memory has, as its prime condition, a high power of analytic- 
synthetic thinking ; it selects and emphasizes relations which become instruments 
for recalling relevant experiences, when they are needed. Bergson, it seems to 
me, almost ignores this logical character of memory. For him the vital urge 
appears to go on more or less blindly creating and accumulating ideas, relevant 
and irrelevant ; fortuitously rolling itself up like a snowball. There is little or 
no logic in it. His conception of memory is too economical; but it seems to be 
a natural consequence of the opposition he sets up between intelligence and 
intuition. Indeed Bergson 's whole philosophy suffers from a defective logic or 
theory of mind. 



374 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

of the organism to other elements of reality, the mind focuses its 
past experience on the present, and thns determines in part the 
character and direction of the organism's reactions to the environ- 
ment. This determination of future reaction is no blind automatic 
reaction or mere reflex. It signifies a redirection of organic 
activity, in such ways that the content of individual experience is 
further enriched in meaning and scope. Operating between the 
organism's past and its future, the mind is able in part to deter- 
mine the character of that future, to enhance its life by enlarging 
the scope and value of its responses or adjustments. Memory, the 
synthetic or unifying function 7 which establishes identity and con- 
tinuity of meaning; analytic and generalizing thought, which 
distills new meanings by analysis and synthetic reconstruction of 
experience; and evaluating and selective choice, are thus the 
supreme functions of mind. They are instruments for the enlarge- 
ment of insight into the organism's own nature and the nature of 
its environment, and thus they are the instruments for the enhance- 
ment of psychic values through intelligent action. 

The body, considered as a system of sense organs, afferent 
nerves and sensory brain centers, is the channel through which the 
mind becomes aware of those nearer and more remote environ- 
mental relationships which are significant for the life and welfare 
of the whole psychophysical individual. Conversely, the body, 
considered as a system of motor brain centers, efferent nerves, and 
motor organs of expression, is the channel through which mind 
effectuates, in terms of its consciously purposive activities, the 
meanings and values which it has distilled from its incoming ex- 
periences. There can be little doubt that the brain centers, as the 
common term in this sensory-reflective-motor arc, supply a vast, 
complicated, and plastic system of connections, through which 
mind, in its functions of remembering, analyzing, synthetizing, 
and recombining the elements of raw experience, is able to suspend 
mere reflex or automatic action ; to check the fatal flow of stimulus 
into blind reaction, and thus, by giving to consciousness an accu- 
mulation or enrichment of sensory materials joined with an 
indeterminate complexity of outgoing connections, to enable the 
conscious mind to "throw the switches" ; to divert and recombine 
in a variety of ways the sensory-motor nerve paths. The synapses 
of the dendritic processes of the cortical neurone cells and the 
interrelations of the main systems of nerve-fibers seem to give 



MIND AND BODY 375 

structural support to this view. Physical stimulus — physiological 
reaction — physical change due to motor organ — thus would run a 
purely reflex activity. Perception — memory — reflection — or anal- 
ysis and synthesis — choice — such are the intervening factors of 
mind which breaks the fatal chain. The diagram of a volitional 
process would run thus : physical stimulus — sensory neural process 
— awareness — memory — reflection and choice — motor neural proc- 
ess and muscular movement. In the cognitive-volitional arc, mind 
is the conscious center for redirection, selective emphasis and 
control. The suspension and alteration of tension and direction 
in the neural processes is the work of mind. 

The self is a trans-spatial center of spatial relationships, and 
thus positively related to extensity. Through the sensory system 
the mind is brought into receptive cognitive relations with physical 
reality. Through the motor system it acts as member of the total 
system of things. From the extensity of sensations to the apparent 
inextensity of "pure" thought there is a series of degrees of 
passage, as M. Bergson would say, from more extensity with less 
tension to less extensity with greater tension. I should prefer to 
say that there is a passage, by degrees, from a more diffused or 
less integrated extensity of motions to a less diffused extensity with 
the highest degree of trans-spatial concentration and integration or 
unification. Mobile extensity is not eliminated by the higher 
thought processes. These processes are unique concentrations or 
condensations, into conscious unity, of extensive dynamical trans- 
actions. Intensity is not the negation of extensity. It is the 
maximum concentration or focalization of extensities, which in 
consciousness becomes the basis of the redistribution of extensive 
relations in a world of mobile elements. By virtue of its power of 
concentration, analysis, and integration, the mind is able to 
redirect physical motions so as partly to conquer space in the 
transportation of bodies and the intercommunication of minds. By 
the anticipatory power of constructive imagination, the mind is 
able to project itself even into the interplanetary reaches of cosmic 
space, and this projection may be the prelude to still vaster con- 
quests of space-restrictions by man. Thus, though associated with 
a space-occupying body, and so having a local habitation, the mind 
is not determined and restricted as a mere physical thing is deter- 
mined and restricted by external space relations. It is able to 
internalize, interpret and selectively choose among these space 



376 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

conditions, and thus, in part control them. But if anyone con- 
fesses himself able to conceive reality as spaceless I confess my 
inability to follow such a conceptual flight into the inane. 

In short, the conscious self is an active center which knows, 
evaluates, chooses, purposes, and acts in a physical universe. How 
my thought and purpose get translated into physical motions I do 
not know. How I perceive colors, sounds, tastes, smells, heat and 
cold, I do not fully understand, the physiologists' and psychol- 
ogists' explanations notwithstanding. I do not understand how 
vibrations of ether or air occasion neural activities, and how these 
in turn occasion sensory-motor processes. I have to come back to 
the simple and universal fact that man sees with his eyes, hears 
with his ears, and smells with his nose. The universality of the 
fact, and the success of inferences and activities based thereon, 
warrant the belief that the world which man thus perceives, and 
which is the only physical world that he does have any immediate 
acquaintance with, is truly an integral part of the order of reality ; 
although it may very well be the case that man's belief as to the 
place of his physical environment in the scheme of things is in part 
erroneous, or rather, very imperfectly represents the complete state 
of things. In any event any speculation which does not base itself 
on the belief in the reality of the physical order, as perceived, is 
open from the outset to the gravest suspicion. Our physical order 
must be a true part or constituent of the total real. 

Similarly, I come back to the simple fact that I understand, 
evaluate and plan, choose and act through my body upon the 
physical things around me. The fact that we do not fully under- 
stand why minds should be conditioned by bodies, and vice versa, 
is not sufficient reason for denying that the relationship in ques- 
tion does obtain. Throughout the world of experience we find that 
life, with all its meanings and interests, involves contrast and 
opposition. Is not the contrast and opposition of body and mind, 
which yet are functionally interdependent, perhaps just the most 
universal marriage of opposites on which depends all the zest and 
significance of life ? Here we seem to touch bottom facts of experi- 
ence. If mind and body were absolutely identical their seeming 
duality or contrast would be a meaningless riddle. If they were 
absolutely independent, even though parallel, their mutual isola- 
tion and correspondence would be equally an insoluble riddle. 
Why should two such fundamental aspects of existence always run 



MIND AND BODY 377 

abreast but never touch? In such case thej would not be two 
aspects but two wholly sundered universes. Cleft by an impassable 
chasm there would be two worlds — the one a realm of insensate 
masses in space — the other a realm of gibbering ghosts. The 
assumption of the absolute identity and the utter disconnectedness 
of mind and body are equally meaningless. Reality is psycho- 
physical individuality. 

APPENDIX I 

MATTER, ENERGY, AND WILL 

The concept of matter is a logical construction to complete our 
picture of a world which, empirically, is incomplete and consists of 
complexes of sensory qualities or physical things and psychical com- 
plexes or experients. 

The concept of matter which is advocated in the present work is 
the dynamic or energetic view. Mass, impenetrability, space-occu- 
pancy, are expressions of the natures and interrelations of centers of 
energy. 

Will is the consciously directed energy of a psychical agent. In- 
deed, as we have previously insisted, all our beliefs in external ener- 
gies, physical agencies, are inferences from our personal experiences 
of suffering and action in relation to the environment. It does not 
follow that physical energies and human will are to be reduced to 
a common denominator, or that all energy is really volitional. To 
argue that, since we recognize and infer the existence of energy and 
activity in the world, only in relation to human actions and suffer- 
ings, therefore all activity must necessarily be of the volitional type 
is to assume the homeopathic dogma that all that is known must be 
like that which knows. It is tantamount to saying that the absurd 
principle "he who drives fat oxen must himself be fat" may be ele- 
vated into a supreme ontological law. It does not follow that, be- 
cause conscious agency can direct physical energies, therefore the 
latter must be volitional agencies in disguise. 

Empirically there are two kinds of agency, physical and psychical. 
It may be that physical energy is the expression of a world will, or 
it may be that physical energy is eternal and unoriginated. This 
problem we shall discuss when we take up the question of the ulti- 
mate unity of things. Certainly, physical energies are powers that 
we must take account of in the fulfillment of our human purposes. In 
no other fashion do we find grounds for recognizing their existence. 
Possibly, the most tenable conception of the ultimate and universal 



378 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

reality is that, in some mysterious fashion, all physical energies 
further the fulfillment of values. 



APPENDIX II 

THE ORIGIN OF THE SOUL 

In the history of thought there are three chief theories of the 
origin of the soul, all based on the assumption that the soul is not 
an epiphenomenon or by-product of physical processes. These theo- 
ries are: 

1. Preexistence or metempsychosis. 

2. Traducianism and 

3. Creationism. 

The doctrine of preexistence, metempsychosis or transmigration, 
is found, to name only a few of its best known exemplars, in the 
Hindu Upanishads, the Buddhist Scriptures, the Pythagoreans, 
Orphics and Plato in Ancient Greece, in Bruno, Leibniz, and in 
present-day philosophy notably in Dr. J. M. E. McTaggart. Ac- 
cording to this doctrine souls are eternal; their number is eternally 
fixed, and the birth and death of earthborn individuals are simply 
critical phases in the soul's pilgrimage through time. In the form 
which Plato gives to the doctrine, in his myths, the rational or spirit- 
ual part of the soul enters our world of space and time as a conse- 
quence of a fall from the changeless, eternal realm of the eternal 
essences or ideas, wages its warfare in this earthly order, and after 
death passes upward or downward in the world of its next embodi- 
ment in accord with the manner in which it has acquitted itself here. 
The supreme evidence of the soul's preexistence and the pledge of 
its post-existence. Plato finds in its participation in the ideas, or 
essential forms, of logical universals, beauty and goodness. During 
its earthly career the soul wakens to a clearer recollection and fuller 
possession of the forms of which it had vision, and with which it had 
full communion, in the supernal realm. 

Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality is probably the 
best known expression of this doctrine in English. 

The doctrine of preexistence has a perennial attractiveness to 
speculative minds. It seems to be the simplest alternative to ma- 
terialism; it offers a plausible doctrine to account for the innate or 
a 'priori capacities of the soul — for the logical structure of reason and 
the ideals of beauty and goodness which haunt and prick to action 
the noblest minds. The Kantian and cognate doctrines of a priorism 
are akin to it. Nevertheless, it is surely at variance with the facts 



MIND AND BODY 379 

of mental heredity and development. If the individual spirit is a 
preexistent and eternal reality, why should not the normal self have 
more concrete and specific memories of its preexisting states of being ? 
Why should one not be able to recollect clearly his personal status 
and social relationships of several thousand years ago? Why should 
men not come more quickly to agreement in regard to logical, ethical, 
moral and, in a word, to spiritual, values? If this doctrine be true 
then this world is not a "vale of soul making" but simply of soul 
reawakening. Then, too, we make no real progress here or hereafter ; 
we simply recover what we had previously lost. What the soul pre- 
viously possessed clearly, for some mysterious reason becomes ob- 
scured here and now. 

The traducianist theory is that the souls of offspring are gen- 
erated from the souls of their parents, as their bodies are from the 
bodies of their parents. Biologists of to-day seem quite generally to 
accept the doctrine of the continuity of the germ plasm and the 
Mendelian doctrine of heredity, according to which unit characters 
persist from generation to generation, and may be combined, disso- 
ciated and recombined, as the generations come and go. Thus the 
body of a child is not so much the immediate offspring of its parent 
body as it is of the germ plasm — a complex of unit characters which 
are transmitted through the parent organisms and presumably are 
modified during the transmission. (There is much dispute on the 
latter point.) Thus the body of a child is the resultant of a combina- 
tion of unit characters effected through the reproductive process and 
modified by the environment. The soul must be, then, either an 
entirely fresh creation, or be the resultant of a new combination of 
psychical unit characters transmitted in the germ plasm and combined 
through the procreative act. Either the mental or spiritual principle 
of creative synthesis is transmitted through the germ plasm, or it 
is injected into the fertilized ovum at some stage in the latter's career 
by an act of special creation. 

The special creation theory of the soul's origin has been widely 
accepted. It is difficult to refute such a theory directly, since we 
have not the data to say just when and how reason or spirit begins 
to function consciously, whether at conception, at some later point 
in prenatal life, or after birth. We do know, however, that while 
there are critical epochs in the history of the individual reason or 
spirit — -such is the beginning of self-consciousness, the storm and 
stress of adolescence, the wakening of ethical and religious reflection, 
the coming to consciousness of ethical, intellectual and other forms 
of creative impulse — these crises are the results of long psychical 
incubation. The life of reason or spirit is more continuous than at 



380 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

first blush it appears to be. The facts of mental and moral heredity 
tell against the special creation hypothesis. 

I conclude, therefore, that the spiritual or rational principle of 
creative synthesis, the divine spark in mind, is the endless immanent 
potency of the creation of spiritual individuality transmitted and 
bursting into actuality generation after generation as an immanent 
continuity of spiritual life process. The process of generation is the 
creative process, not only in the sense of the creation of new vital 
and psychical individuals, by ever varying combinations of the funda- 
mental unit characters of man, but, as well, of the continuous crea- 
tion of new spiritual individualities. It is a process of continuous 
creation, of new centers of creative synthesis, of a higher kind than 
the other forms of creative synthesis manifested in the various 
grades and stages of cosmic evolution. 

In short mental or spiritual individualities working through the 
procreative act are the endlessly fecund sources of new mental indi- 
vidualities. Tennyson writes: 

A soul shall draw from out the vast 
And strike his being into bounds 8 

Again he writes : 

Of that infinite One 
Who made thee unconquerably Thyself 
Out of this whole world — Self and all in all — 
Live thou! and of the grain and husk, the grape 
And ivy berry choose; and still depart 
From death to death thro life and life, and find 
Nearer and ever nearer Him, who wrought 
Not matter, nor the finite-infinite 
But this main miracle, that thou art thou, 
With power on thine own act and on the world. 9 

Such utterances, like the words of religious seers and philosophers, 
express in imaginative form the superlative estimate of value and 
meaning as inhering in spiritual individuality or personality. They 
formulate, in terms of cosmic origin and relationships, that faith in 
the worth and dignity of the human spirit which accompanies every 
creative deed and vision in human kind. Can one translate these 
utterances into the plain prose of philosophy and square them in any 
fashion with the findings of reason ? 

8 In Memoriam. Sixth stanza from the end, 
9 De Profundis. 



MIND AND BODY 381 

The spirit or reason or creative imagination is the principle of 
creative synthesis, through the operation of which the biological 
complex of psychophysical unit characters forming the newborn 
individual, becomes a personality; the rational or spiritual self, self- 
determining and capable of serving and achieving intrinsic values. 
The "spirit," as the principle of rational integration, is evoked into 
activity through the urgent needs of redirection and organization of 
the native biological tendencies (the natural man). Thus, we may 
say, the spiritual principle in man is a principle of supervenient re- 
flective integration "granted," as Lotze puts it, by the order of the 
universe to a specific vital constellation. 

The division of reality into two realms, "natural" and "super- 
natural," has its source in an estimation of relative values. If nature 
be conceived as an insensate mechanism, or at best an unconscious 
vital urge; then the principle of valuation, namely, that the values 
of directive and creative thought, of moral insight and volition, of 
aesthetic creation and religious communion are the highest and 
worthiest functions of man, lead to the assertion that the source of 
these values is supernature. In any adequate philosophical sense of 
nature, the life of values, the life of spirit, is just as natural as the 
bodily life. Indeed the spiritual works are higher and truer because 
richer and more adequate expressions of the total meaning of the 
real than merely sentient organisms and their works, and higher 
still than physicochemical complexes and functions. The personal 
spirit and its works furnish our best key to the meaning of the 
cosmos, since personality is the most macrocosmic of all finite forms 
of existence, 



CHAPTEE XXVIII 

PERSONALITY AND THE CULTURAL ORDER 

The natural self, that is, the human being considered simply 
as an animal organism, is not a person. He becomes a person only 
through development in the medium of a system of social culture 
or nurture. Owing to the overweight of biological thinking to-day 
in psychology, sociology, and philosophy, and also owing in part 
to the grievous wounds that the occidental systems of social culture 
have received in the late war, there is grave danger of our minimiz- 
ing the significance of social institutions and of the whole social 
ethos in the development of personality. Even so-called savages 
have closely knit systems of social culture. "The state of nature," 
whether conceived in terms of Hobbes or Rousseau, would be a 
condition in which human beings could not be human beings. 
Whatsoever genuine progress may have taken place in human 
history, has consisted solely in the development of cultural systems 
better adapted to the nurture of the qualities which constitute 
human personality. A one-sided and unhistorical regard for the 
results and methods of natural science leads men to ignore the 
fact that natural science can flourish only as an element in a 
system of social culture and as ministering to the development of 
human personality. Equally, an exclusive regard for the biological 
pit from which man has been digged leads psychology to ignore, 
and even to deny, the existence of those qualities of personality 
which have been engendered in the life of culture, but which can- 
not be measured in laboratories or found by anatomical and 
physiological study of the genus homo of the Simian group. 

The great idealists, Plato, Fichte, Hegel, Royce, and Bosanquet 
are great idealists precisely because, in one fashion or another, 
they have clearly recognized that it is through participation in the 
objective structures of social culture that man rises to the stature 
of personality, and therefore, than an adequate philosophical inter- 
pretation of experience must accord a central place to the achieve- 

382 



PERSONALITY AND THE CULTURAL ORDER 383 

ments and activities of culture? — to the objective mind, to use 
Hegel's term — in and through which the subjective mind of the 
human animal develops personality. It is in the spirit of the 
great idealists, though in my own way, that I wish now to consider 
the general features of the interaction between the individual and 
cultural systems. 1 

I will begin by summarizing briefly some commonplaces of 
social psychology. The self-development of the individual involves 
the direction and control of his congenital impulses by social pat-, 
terns in action and thought. Under the play of cultural influences 
resident in the social system, the individual is awakened to norms 
or general standards of conduct and thought. In this way he 
becomes socialized, or moralized and rationalized. His activity is 
controlled, and his thinking and feeling are shaped, by the typical 
social attitudes which are embodied in the customs and institutions 
which constitute the cultural system of a society; such as the 
institutions of the family, the community, industrial life, the state 
and the church; the prevailing bodies of belief and modes' of 
valuation in regard to politics, morals, art, education and religion. 
Thus persons are developed from human animals, through their 
individual assimilation of the current systems of belief and con- 
duct, by their reactions to the established types of social judgment 
and valuation. As the person develops, if the actual social ethos 
be spiritually poverty-stricken or restrictive, he may seek spiritual 
sustenance in the richer past, or he may strive to create new values. 
But I opine that, if dissatisfied with the spiritual ethos of the 
present, the individual strives to create new values by violently 
breaking with cultural history and shooting out of the blue, it is 
unlikely that he will add greatly to the sum of human culture. 

In the process of being socialized, or moralized and rational- 
ized, the individual becomes a better organized and more repre- 
sentative self, through the better articulation of his congenital 

1 The ideas embodied in the present chapter were first stated by me in 
a paper read before the American Philosophical Association in December, 1904, 
and which appeared in the Philosophical Beview for 1905, Vol. xiv, pp. 669-683. 
I discussed the subject further in an article entitled "Ethics, Sociology and 
Personality, Philosophical Beview, Vol. xv, pp. 494-510. Prof. G. P. Adam's 
Idealism and the Modern Age brings out in a somewhat different way some 
of the main points in this attitude. Dr. Florian Znaniecki's Cultural Beality 
is an interesting introduction to a philosophy of culture. The German 
Kultur-Philosophen, especially Windelband, Kickert, and Scheler, have con- 
tributed important discussions to this matter. 



384 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

capacities and through the growth of his aims in concreteness and 
social reference. All aspects of the self share in the generalization 
and articulation of character effected by interpersonal intercourse. 
The emotional reactions and will-attitudes of the individual con- 
tinue to be uniquely his own ; but, under the influence of the social 
reason and social types of action and feeling, individual feeling 
gains at once in breadth of range and fineness of organization. 
Thus the individual, as self-determining agent, comes to regard his 
own individuality as the servant and organ of the intrinsic spirit- 
ual values which are the basis of the cultural life — the values of 
truth, justice, friendship, fellowship, love, beauty, and holiness. 
Thus the individual becomes an integral and cooperant member 
of the social system of wills. Thus, as the organ for the expression 
and realization of social and ideal values, he takes on a more sig- 
nificant, organized, and universal character. 

The social occasions for the individual's activity consist in the 
various historical systems or complex bodies of thought and con- 
duct, in the atmosphere of which he is nurtured and which confront 
him with their explicit demands and commands. Viewed as a 
totality, these systems constitute the cultural-historical ethos or 
spirit of a time, a nation, a community. In law and morals, in 
politics, in science, and in religion and art, the individual member 
of a given period, nation, and community, finds himself confronted 
with more or less coherent group-systems which demand his loyal 
obedience or explicit rejection, his allegiance, criticism, or trans- 
formation. 

These systems grow and change as they get summed up and 
modified in and through the actions of successive series of social 
groups and of individuals. Illustrations of such systems or his- 
torical complexes of ideas lie everywhere at hand in the institu- 
tions of contemporary civilization. Such are, for example, the 
established average code of customary morality (Sittlichheit) ; the 
body of authoritative current scientific opinion; codes of social 
manners ; the working systems of industrial groups such as trade- 
unions, employer's associations, etc. ; political systems of ideas 
(democracy, socialism, imperialism, party traditions, etc.) ; sys- 
tems of religious doctrine and practice represented by various 
churches and sects which, of course, are preeminently embodiments 
of historical complexes of ideas, etc. It is through interaction 
with these groups of ideas, which we may call partial or elementary 



PERSONALITY AND THE CULTURAL ORDER 385 

culture systems, 2 that the rational activity of the self is mani- 
fested. These systems are, in turn, the creations of personal 
activities. Human culture is the result and the record of personal 
deeds, no less in science and philosophy than in statecraft, morals, 
war, industry, and religion. The great creative personalities of 
history are the supreme embodiments of a spiritual self-activity, 
which every child of civilization, who enters with maturing self- 
consciousness into his work, must likewise manifest in some degree. 
However uncreative the mass of men may seem to be, each matur- 
ing personality appropriates the materials of culture by an indi- 
vidual reaction. Education is the process by which the spiritual 
or cultural heritage of the race is presented to the individual mind 
and assimilated by that mind. 

The culture system of music or plastic art may pass over many 
an individual's head because he is insensitive to aesthetic values ; 
but the systems of individual and social morality and of religion 
demand on the part of every member of society some sort of active 
attitude. Every man must take some attitude towards the moral 
obligations of his station, and, whether the attitude taken be 
receptive, critical or hostile, some degree of self-activity is in- 
volved. Thus the individual is a unique center of mental reaction 
in the historical culture-process of society. In his affirmations and 
rejections of cultural types and tendencies in thought, feeling, and 
action, he is either actualizing his own spiritual potencies or allow- 
ing them to perish of inanition. It is not through the narrow and 
circumscribed limits and poverty of contents of passing moments 
of consciousness, as revealed by introspection or retrospection, that 
we shall gain an adequate conception of the nature of the human 
self. What such analysis reveals is frequently but the trivialness, 
the insignificance, and meanness of the introspector's own con- 
scious processes. What a human personality really means to be, 
and sometimes is, can be understood only from an intelligent appre- 
ciation of the culture history of humanity. Through the wider 
vistas of the comparative history of ethics, politics, science, indus- 
try, the arts, philosophy and religion, do we first get a significant 
glimpse of man's spiritual nature and powers, as revealed in the 
ideals, the values, and deeds wrought into his civilizations ; and as 
unceasingly actualizing itself in the movement of spiritual or 

2 67. the treatment of this matter in Eucken's Life's Basis and Life's 
Ideal and Ver Kampf urn einen geistigen Lebensinhalt. 



386 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

cultural history. Culture is at once the socialized creation of 
mind, and the instrument for the development of the individual 
mind. 

The life of the human spirit is a constant dialectical process 
of self -transcendence of the given or empirical selfhood, the denial 
of the attained self, which is the achievement of a larger and more 
integrated selfhood. The fuller and more harmonious spiritual 
life is achieved by the individual only in so far as he forgets and 
passes beyond his already attained state of being, only in so far as 
he contemns and spurns his old self, dies to his past, and thus finds 
a more rational, wider, more harmonious selfhood through willing 
service and sympathetic participation in the aims and interests of 
that spiritual commonwealth of selves whose realization is the true 
meaning of the whole movement of human culture. 

The first steps in this denial and self-transcendence of the 
merely empirical or animal self, which is at the same time the 
beginning of the spiritual personality, are taken by participation 
in the historical institutions of society — family, community, and 
nation ; school, science, and philosophy ; art and letters ; manners, 
morals, and religion. The forms and contents of the cultural com- 
plexes represented by the above titles have undergone, and are still 
undergoing, change. Social culture is subject to constant mutation 
in some of its factors and, at times, in all. For example, the 
influence of organized dogmatic religion on the average West- 
European and American has both narrowed in extent and weak- 
ened in intensity since the close of the Middle Ages. Eeligion has 
become much more a matter of individual choice and attitude. 
Art probably does not mean in the life of European people to-day 
what it meant for the Italians of the Renaissance, and certainly 
it plays to-day a very minor and unimportant role in the life of the 
United States. There is as yet but little evidence of an awakening 
to the cultural and moral significance of beauty amongst us. Con- 
trast the place of art in American life with the place it occupied 
in Periclean Athens or in the Italy of the Eenaissance ! In science 
and philosophy the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
otherwise prolific in great ideas, hardly had an inkling of the tre- 
mendously significant conceptions of natural evolution and his- 
torical development, which to-day pervade all our thinking on 
nearly every subject. In the Middle Ages virginity was esteemed 
a much higher ethical state than marriage. Contrast the Christian 



PERSONALITY AND THE CULTURAL ORDER 387 

doctrine of chastity with the ancient Greek ideal of continence or 
moderation! To the Greek slavery was a natural institution not 
questioned. It is unnecessary further to multiply examples. 

Through his stimulation by, and reaction to, the whole his- 
torical process of culture the individual enters into the use of the 
common heritage of spiritual achievement, and is thereby quick- 
ened to the exercise of a rational freedom or self-determination in 
the light of the patterns of thought and action supplied by the race. 
He is challenged to find and express, by his individual choices and 
deeds, the rational meanings and values of life. Thus, by his own 
reactions to the cultural stimuli and materials, the externally given 
fact and type of conduct and thought become internal and vital, the 
institutional becomes personal, the dead past of tradition and 
status quo in custom and belief become transformed into a living 
present, instinct with meaning and interest. The world of passive 
historical fact and social institution becomes a spiritual universe of 
present worth. 

The literature and philosophy of Greece are but dead encum- 
brances on my mind unless I can find in them expressions of emo- 
tion, attitudes of will, significant interpretations of the meaning 
of human experience and destiny, that quicken and enlarge my 
own spiritual insight and shed light on the problems of human life 
to-day. The philosophy of a Descartes or a Kant are mere archaeo- 
logical lumber, unless they have living contact with and influence 
upon the problems of systematic thought to-day. The principles 
of social morality proclaimed by the Hebrew prophets are fossils 
of a dead and gone stratum of civilization unless they are found 
to bear pertinently on living issues of social ethics and religion. 
The gospel of Jesus is a worthless survival unless it really in- 
terprets, elevates, and directs towards higher levels, the personal 
and social aspirations and needs of the human spirit to-day. 

On the other hand, through the vital assimilation of these 
and other historical achievements and revelations of the ongoing 
spiritual life of humanity, the life of the present is lifted out 
of its narrow and parochial outlook and delivered from the blind- 
ness of action and faith, which comes from seeing the present 
only in the light of its own broken and distorted rays. The pres- 
ent can never be understood in the light of the present alone. Its 
ills can never be diagnosed or cured with the instruments which 
itself alone supplies. To interpret the present aright, and to find 



388 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the means for its elevation, we must read its problems and tasks 
in the light of the universal meanings and values derived from 
setting the present in its relations to the past. The personal life 
is enlarged and inspired by entrance, through communion with 
the past, into the eternal ongoing spiritual life of the race, in 
which the scholastic distinctions of past and present are overcome. 
A finer and stronger sense of the value of beauty and order comes 
to us through assimilation of the Greek spirit. A deeper sense 
of the moral foundations of society is generated through assimila- 
tion of the prophetic ideals of the Hebrews. A stronger con- 
viction of the permanent worth of the spirit in man is aroused by 
appropriation of the living content of the Gospel of Jesus. 

Into the living present the spiritual past of the race enters 
as a dynamic and illuminating factor. Past and present are 
fused into a living and continuous whole of spiritual life, from 
which issues the future. There is a temporal continuity, a total- 
ity of intercommunion, in the successive stages of man's racial- 
spiritual history which strongly supports the hypothesis of a time- 
transcending spiritual whole, a universal and eternal spiritual 
reality into active relation with which the finite individual and 
the single historical epoch may enter, drawing from it and con- 
tributing to it by their own deeds. 

The real personality of man is not the passively molded 
product of historical forces and social institutions. Man can 
affirm his free personality, by his reactions to these forces and 
institutions. Every rationally conscious self is a new and origi- 
nal center of reaction and influence in the total complex of social 
culture. The acts of the individual are the functioning of a meta- 
historical principle in the historical order. While the human per- 
son, considered as an empirical center of psychical life, is realized 
and expressed only in dependence upon the social-historical sys- 
tems of culture, these systems are in turn the resultants of the 
mental acts of selves in society. They grow up, and are shaped 
and transformed, through the interrelations of selves. These 
social-historical systems have life and meaning only in so far as 
they are assimilated and affirmed by selves. 

They are most strikingly modified, and sometimes wholly 
transformed, by the deeds of great historical personalities. The 
founder of a new religion finds his point of departure in existing 
religious ideas and practices ; but, under his creative hand, these 



PERSONALITY AND THE CULTURAL ORDER 389 

undergo metamorphosis, usually by way of simplification and 
addition; as in the cases of Christianity and Buddhism. A 
Copernicus and a Galileo revolutionize current astronomical con- 
ceptions. Darwin gives the science of biology an entirely fresh 
start. The changes wrought by creative genius are usually less 
marked in morals, customs and laws ; here the work of genius takes 
effect more slowly but no less certainly. As examples of the 
transforming influence of the great personality, consider Confu- 
cius and Buddha, Socrates and Plato, Jesus and St. Paul, Mo- 
hammed and Luther, in the fields of religion and morals ! In art 
and letters consider a few that occur to my mind at random, 
Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Shakespeare, Raphael, 
Michelangelo, Goethe! Whatever be the precise character of 
the influence exerted by the great personality in the movement 
of human culture, whether it be mainly critical as in Protagoras, 
Hume, and Voltaire; reformatory and re-creative as in Socrates, 
Plato, Luther, Kant, and Goethe ; in every case he sets out by his 
individual reaction to the whole complex culture system of his 
own time or to some element in it. Luther, for example, desired, 
while attacking the Roman practice as to the relation of faith and 
morals to the Catholic Church, to leave mediaeval theology for the 
most part undisturbed and did indeed so leave it. And, of course, 
traditional complexes creep back into new movements and pro- 
foundly alter their character. Illustrations in abundance will 
occur to any reader well-informed in the history of Christianity. 

The individual great or small, significant or insignificant, then 
is conditioned in ideas and deeds by the historical complexes which 
I have called culture systems ; and the individual in some degree 
adds to, takes away from, or alters, the social heritage of culture. 

And every mature human individual, great or small, actual- 
izes his personality by assimilating and reacting to the complex 
whole of culture systems which is the very atmosphere of his own 
life. This whole is constituted by the more or less harmonious 
blending of partial culture systems or historical complexes of 
ideas in morals, religion, science, and politics. 

These systems may sometimes lie in mere juxtaposition in 
his mind, or they may be in partial antagonism. For example, 
the systems of scientific and theological thought, of ethical ideals 
and business practice, by which an individual is influenced, may 
be antagonistic to one another. But, in any case, the individual 
of human culture, whether it be mainly critical as in Protogoras, 



390 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

comes to his own as a rational personality only in so far as he 
assimilates and reacts to these systems. He attains rational self- 
consciousness and becomes an active spirit or person by develop- 
ing conscious attitudes towards the various groups of commands, 
demands, and solicitations, in the midst of which alone man can 
awaken to the life of reason. To take conscious attitudes in these 
varied relations of the culture-life is to actualize one's spiritual 
selfhood. The attitudes assumed not only vary from man to man, 
but in the individual they may be complex and varied. The in- 
dividual may wholly reject some of the historical complexes of 
ideas presented to him and wholly accept others. 

The individual may wholly accept the scientific and wholly 
reject the religious systems of ideas of his time (for example 
Haeckel and in part Huxley), or he may criticize and sift all. 
The individual may be predominantly receptive in all directions 
(as the average man is), or critical (Hume, Voltaire), or reforma- 
tory and recreative (Socrates, Kant, Goethe). He maybe critical 
in science and merely receptive in religion and politics, or critical 
in politics and merely receptive in science and morals, etc., 
through all the possible combinations. Again, he may with seem- 
ing passivity accept and assimilate all uncritically. This the 
mass of men seem to do. But even in the latter case, there is in 
the mature individual an element of at least partially conscious 
reaction in apprehending and assimilating that to which he gives 
allegiance. The very process of appropriating into one's own 
spirit, of making one's own, the materials of culture is an indi- 
vidual reaction. These historical complexes of ideas which I have 
called "culture systems," then, are never wholly foreign or ex- 
trinsic to the individual spirit. Even in the limiting case of seem- 
ing total passivity just mentioned, the actual self is not a mere 
creature of traditional and conventional tendencies. And, indeed, 
the various partial culture systems and the whole ethos of a period 
are vital and potent only in so far as they are absorbed and relived 
in the thoughts and deeds of persons. Eegarded as merely his- 
torical, these systems are but slumbering potentialities of mental 
development and spiritual influence. But when they are taken 
up into the individual life and give content and direction to this, 
they become present, over-historical powers. The general move- 
ment of spiritual history has a certain continuity, but, as it is 
summed up, relived, and transformed in groups of men and in 



PERSONALITY AND THE CULTURAL ORDER 391 

individuals, it becomes discrete, and the reactions of each indi- 
vidual and group to the culture environment constitute a series 
of unique deeds. 

Moreover, a historical comparison of the growth, the rise and 
modification and fall of culture systems, as well as a comparison 
of the will attitudes of living individuals towards the various 
culture systems which constitute a general social situation, would 
make it plain that, in being assimilated and relived, systems of 
ideas are undergoing constant, although often minute and inap- 
preciable transformations. Molded and modified as they are 
by the assimilative and recreative thought and will attitudes of 
individuals, these systems rise and fall, stagnate and grow, and, 
in short, undergo constant modification by personal reactions. 
"The human beings who live, who have lived, and who are yet to 
live, form in themselves one immense system, in which the small- 
est movement of each single one is for the most part impercep- 
tible, but yet affects by its influence the general unceasing progress. 
History is the relation of the fluctuations which occur on a large 
scale, from the dissimilarity of the powers of individual men. 
Our desire to study history is the longing to know the law of these 
fluctuations, and of the distribution of power affecting them." 3 
On a large scale, of course, it is the creative historical person- 
alities — founders of religions, moral prophets and reformers, 
political innovators, aesthetic creators, scientific discoverers — 
who display, in the eyes of all who have eyes to see, this dynamic 
and recreative unity of individual life. The preeminent indi- 
vidual is the chief originating center in the historical movement 
of civilization. Whatever view one may take of the reciprocal 
relations between great historical personalities and the masses of 
their fellows, no progress can be made towards understanding the 
movements of past and present society unless we clearly recognize 
that concrete individuals are the creators, bearers, transformers 
of the whole process of culture. History has being and actuality 
only in so far as it is concentrated in the living activities and 
experiences of selves. Hence so-called general tendencies, social 
movements, the social consciousness, public opinion, the spirit of 
the age, etc., are actual and efficient only in so far as they are 
incorporated in the beliefs and deeds of persons. 

The contention of the present argument is that what these 
8 H. Grimm, Life of Michelangelo, Vol. I, p. 62 (Edition of 1898). 



392 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

great historical personalities do on a large scale every individual 
who comes to maturity of life does in some measure, and that 
hence the central nature of the human person is actualized and 
manifested in his individual reactions as a member of a historical 
culture. These reactions are the affirmations of an ultimate prin- 
ciple in the self. The personal values which they embody vary 
from individual to individual and shift from age to age. But the 
historical and the over-historical are fused in the living person- 
ality. And if we interpret and compare the evolution of human 
attitudes or personal and social valuations according to this 
method, we shall arrive at the conception of a cosmic and meta- 
historical system of individual spiritual centers which manifests 
itself in the historical movement of humanity. For the self is at 
once conditioned by and conditions its culture-matrix. In its 
active, conditioning aspect, it is a hyper-empirical meta-historical 
unity; in its aspect as conditioned and dependent, it is empirical 
and historical. In the former respect it is timeless, in the latter 
it develops in time; and these two aspects stand in organic re- 
lationship in the actual historical life of man. From this stand- 
point, the active attitude or dynamic center of personality becomes 
an ultimate, a limit to explanation and analysis. The active unity 
of the socially and historically significant culture self is a cumu- 
lative and creative center in the spiritual evolution of humanity. 
It transcends the phenomenal causal order. It cannot be dis- 
sected into elements or accounted for in terms of a nexus whose 
highest category is that of the mechanical equivalence of cause 
and effect. There is in the self an irreducible center of unity not 
residing in an inert substance, but consisting of a principle of 
actuality or rational spontaneity. 

In the actual, historical personality, there is an active or 
dynamic unity which is realized and manifested through the as- 
similation and transformation of social culture systems. Civiliza- 
tion is a spiritual process in which man fashions for himself ever 
anew the instruments and materials for the actualization of his 
possibilities as person or rational spirit. And the history of cul- 
ture is seen from this standpoint to be the record of man's shift- 
ing emphasis, in self-discovery and self-affirmation, on the rela- 
tive values — hedonic, ethical, intellectual, aesthetic, etc. — of the 
various partial systems or groups of ideas which constitute the 
spiritual matrix for the growth and movement of self hood. 



PERSONALITY AND THE CULTURAL ORDER 393 

Kant made the active synthetizing unity of consciousness, 
Bewusstsein ueberhwwpt, the universal formal timeless principle 
of knowledge and moral action. This Kantian principle is the 
impersonal function of pure thinking and willing, the abstract 
and changeless principle of intellectual synthesis. It is the uni- 
versal thinker which thinks in all rational finite beings. It is 
distinct from the empirical self or actual individual. We only 
know that it is, and that without it there could be no knowledge 
of a world. How it is related to the empirical self Kant does not 
make clear. His disciple Fichte made this universal ego the only 
reality. According to him, it manifests itself in the infinite series 
of finite egos. What is the relation of our metaphysical or meta- 
historical principle of individuality to Kant's doctrine ? I hold 
that, while individual minds have a common structure, and a 
common or universal principle of rational and spiritual func- 
tioning, and thus exhibit an identical nature, this nature is not 
existentially identical in all minds, We may say that the prin- 
ciple is repeated in each; but each individual is, as an existence, 
distinct and unique. The individual is real and his relationships 
to the totality of the real are those of a unique center who is 
able, as thinking and feeling being, to enter into a manifold 
variety of connections with other selves. The unity of the self is 
that of a uniquely personal will. The self has a history and is 
subject to development from unconscious latency to conscious 
actuality. The empirical person results from the interaction of 
the synthetic creative principle, which is the root of individuality, 
with biological and cultural stimuli and materials. The active 
unifier is at first known as a dim and fluctuating self-feeling 
present in impulse and desire. The organization of this chaotic 
feeling self into a harmonious individuality can take place only 
through the concomitant organization of its experience in the vital 
interactions with nature and culture. The natural or biological 
ego must struggle and suffer, it must deny itself and go out into 
the world of external nature and culture in order that it may 
come home to itself as a rational unity, an integrated whole of 
feeling and insight, of will and thought. The organization of a 
significant and coherent world of nature, and a world of social 
order — morality, art, religion and philosophy—is at the same time 
the development of selves into self-directing harmony and totality 
of life. Thus selves come to know themselves and to realize their 



394 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

spiritual powers as unique centers in which the meanings of the 
realm of nature and the cultural values of social history are being 
actualized and enjoyed. This process of the actualization of mean- 
ings and values through and in the lives of selfhood is one that, 
so far as we can see, is unceasing and incomplete as a world 
process and yet is forever being fulfilled as the generations come 
and go. 

The unity of the self is thus a central factor in the organiza- 
tion of experience into a cosmos. The implicit unity of the self 
becomes distinctly known and effective only in vital relation to 
and dependence on the world. On the other hand, it is through 
constant activity of selves that the world of experience is organ- 
ized and grows in meanings and values; the only vital unity-in- 
difference, the only dynamic center of cultural and cosmical re- 
lationships and values that we can conceive is that which functions 
in persons. The world of our common or rational experience and 
thinking, the realm of nature which exists for us as knowers and 
doers only by virtue of our cooperation in the social-historical life 
of humanity, is a realm of potential personality; the self is the 
world discovering and affirming its own meaning — the cosmos 
attaining to self-consciousness. Thus selfhood or personality dis- 
covers the meaning of the cosmical process; and the only con- 
ceivable cosmos is one implicated in, and known through, the 
organizing and interpreting activities of selves. 



CHAPTEE XXIX 



PEKSONALITY AND VALUES 1 



Thus far, in our treatment of personality, we have considered 
it chiefly from the standpoint of philosophical psychology — in 
fine, as the individuated center of experience and the focus of 
social relationships. We have now to consider the self as source 
and center of reference for values. The most persistent and cen- 
tral characteristic of the self is the fact that it evaluates, appre- 
ciates, and hence exercises selective preference among its possible 
ends and possessions. The root of valuation is feeling or interest 
A colorless knower would not individuate his objects, but a con- 
scious individual always individuates and thus selects and values 
objects in terms of interest or feeling. All human valuation, then, 
is due to the fact that the self is a feeling center. The philos- 
opher, no less than the lover or gourmand, selects and rejects his 
objects of interest and enjoyment in terms of himself as the 
central mass of feeling reacting to these objects. Because we feel 
we exercise selective preferences and arrange the activities, enjoy- 
ments and relationships which are actual or possible for us, on 
a scale of values. 2 



1 This chapter is the expansion of an article on ' ' Personality and a 
Metaphysics of Value" in The International Journal of Ethics, Vol. xxi, 
October, 1910, pp. 23-36. 

2 The question has been discussed (by Ehrenfels, Meinong, Urban and 
others) whether the psychological process of valuation is identical with desire 
(Ehrenfels), or the sense of value is given in feelings of value (Wertgefuhle) 
that follow on judgments involving the recognition of the existence or non- 
existence of objects (Meinong). This is a psychological question which does 
not directly concern us here. It seems to me that desire implies value and that 
we may desire and value that which we recognize to be nonexistent. I may, 
for instance, desire and value for myself a life in which I should have ample 
leisure to read and write poetry. I cannot conceive myself valuing anything 
and not desiring it. In view, however, of the ambiguities in the use of the 
term ' ' desire, ' ' it would be better, perhaps, to say that valuation springs from 
interest. If one has no interest in a thing, one does not value it, and vice 
versa. One can be interested in things that do not exist, provided one has 
desire for such things, 



396 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

We may distinguish between the incipient feelings of value and 
the explicit judgment of value. Any agreeable feeling has posi- 
tive value, since it satisfies some interest of the self; but an ex- 
plicit judgment of value is the reflective assertion that the interest 
in question is satisfied. Logically, a judgment of value is of 
the same order as a judgment of existence. To say "this is good, 
noble, beautiful" is a judgment in the same sense as to say "it is 
true, real, cold or red." In judgments of value a universal or 
meaning is predicated of a subject. In both judgments of exist- 
ence and of value the subject is either a concrete experience or an 
intellectual construction therefrom. The same subjects may be 
qualified by both types of judgment. For example, "this is a 
landscape and a beautiful one." The one important difference 
between judgments of value and all other types of judgment is 
this — all judgments of value affirm (or affirm by denying) that 
objects have agreeable or disagreeable, satisfying or dissatisfying, 
qualities-in-relation-to-selves, whereas judgments of existence, that 
is, all purely cognized qualities and- relationships, may make as- 
sertions concerning real existence considered apart from any indi- 
vidual self. Valuation is thus always a subject-object relation 
and, thus far, is like cognition. But, whereas in pure cognition 
the object cognized is assumed to possess as such the cognized 
qualities and relations independently of the subject, there would 
be no meaning whatsoever in saying that an object had value 
apart from a subject. If there be objective character in values, 
it cannot be an objectivity that is real apart from all subjects. 
There is no "beautiful," there is no "good," but thinking makes 
it so. On the other hand, if there are electrons, there are elec- 
trons, whether we think so or not. Of course, theoretical judg- 
ments have various degrees and kinds of practical value. That is 
another question. The values that such judgments have are due 
to the interest of selves in them. Psychologically, many cognitive 
judgments are made because of some sort of interest. Others are 
made involuntarily or perforce. 

Practical or value judgments are of two sorts of values: in- 
strumental or mediate values, the values possessed by things and 
events as means for the attainments of ends beyond themselves; 
intrinsic or immediate values, the values which things and rela- 
tionships have as ends-in-themselves, as immediately satisfying 
to persons. Here we are concerned primarily with intrinsic 



PERSONALITY AND VALUES 397 

values. But the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic 
values is by no means a hard and fast one. The means and the 
end cannot be separated. The end justifies the means, provided 
the means to the given end do not defeat another equally worthy 
end. An end worthy in itself may be nullified by the means 
taken for its accomplishment ; for example, if, in order to support 
his family, a man sacrifices his integrity. An end not of high 
worth in itself may become ennobled by the means ; for example, 
the selfless devotion of love and loyalty are noble things even 
though the objects be unworthy of the service dedicated to them. 

Economic values are purely exchange values, purely instru- 
mental. But, if we look upon economic activities from the stand- 
point of human well-being, then the center of emphasis shifts and 
economic values cease to become merely exchange values. Eco- 
nomic wealth is viewed from the standpoint of consumption. 3 
The gaining of a livelihood may be carried on in a worthy or a 
degrading fashion. Earning one's living should be both a con- 
tribution to the service of others and a means of realizing one's 
own personality. That it is so often not is due to the prevalent 
materialism of western civilization — a materialism that is very 
patent to oriental thinkers. Thus economic activity should have 
both instrumental and intrinsic values. Bodily health and 
strength are, from the spiritual standpoint, instrumental values; 
but do they not constitute, in part, intrinsic values, in so far as 
they may conduce to the happiness and beauty of their posses- 
sor, enable him to have time and energy and zest for social service 
and the cultivation of letters, the arts or sciences? ^Esthetic 
values are both instrumental and intrinsic. Plastic art and music 
refresh and stimulate the mind of the thinker and at the same 
time have value in themselves. Scholarship, scientific investi- 
gation, creative work in arts and letters, even teaching, are both 
instrumental and intrinsic in value. 

I think that, in any society or individual, the separation of 
instrumental and intrinsic values is a mark of defect, of failure. 
Nothing more clearly evidences the failure of western civilization 
than the great gap which separates the industrialist and com- 
mercialist (whether employer or employee), and the ruler, from 
intelligent and spiritual participation in the values of art, letters, 

•See, for example, J. A. Hobson's Work and Wealth. 



398 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

science and learning and even religion. Spiritually our civiliza- 
tion is maimed, halt and blind. 

A classification and survey of values is an important part of 
systematic philosophy, only in so far as thereby we may be able 
to set in a clearer and fuller light the dynamic idealizing and 
purposive tendencies and functions of selves or persons. A meta- 
physics of values can only be regarded as a special way of formu- 
lating a metaphysics of persons. 

With this principle in mind I offer here, in outline, a tentative 
classification of the most significant and important human valua- 
tions. The list is not exhaustive, and I do not claim for the classi- 
fication either logical completeness or inherent necessity. I do 
not know how one could proceed to satisfy either of these claims. 
I found my guiding principles simply by examining the empirical 
character and relations of personality. The classification is made 
as a means of getting forward with the main contention that the 
metaphysics of values must be, in effect, a metaphysics of persons, 
and that the final reality and supremacy of values in the world- 
order stands or falls with the reality and persistence of persons in 
this world-order. I hold that a person is, by the nature of the 
case, a more real reality, if the phrase be permissible, than even 
the most "over-individual" and "ineffable" value. 

The three fundamental relations in which the human person 
stands, takes preferential attitudes, and has typical experiences, 
are to nature, fellowman, and God or the supreme reality and 
unity, however this may be conceived. The classification of in- 
trinsic valuing attitudes may then be determined with reference 
to these three types of relationship. And, in and for the valu- 
ing person, there are three main types of valuing attitudes. These 
are: (1) theoretical or truth-attitudes; (2) practical or overt- 
action attitudes; (3) immediate emotional or feeling-attitudes. 
Each one of these types of valuing attitudes may be differentiated 
in each one of the three fundamental relationships of the experi- 
encing and attitude-taking self. Further, in each group there will 
be a differentiation of values uncontrolled by any single nu- 
merical principle. And, since persons do not live and function as 
machines or series of compartments, there are complex cross- 
valuations. (Df these a complete enumeration is not necessary, 
or, perhaps, even possible. 

In the truth-value attitudes, which have to do with the ac- 



PERSONALITY AND VALUES 399 

ceptance and interpretation of fact-in-relation, we get: (1) The 
reality of nature in its separate elements and in their connections 
as parts of a whole. In knowing the physical world we accept it 
as it is, independent of our feelings and desires, and we find 
worth in interpreting it and submitting our minds to its leading, 
as thus accepted in all the variety of its elemental features and 
their connections. Thus we get and value natural science, as a 
systematic account of the given world-order. (2) The reality of 
our fellowmen. We find an intrinsic worth in knowing the actual 
character of human nature as expressed in its deeds and utter- 
ances in the living present and in the historical past. A system- 
atic and growing knowledge of human nature in all the variety 
and interrelatedness of its elements constitutes the psychological, 
social, and historical sciences. (3) The reality of God, the Su- 
preme Unity of the real. We find a worth in knowing God and 
our relations with him, and this knowledge, if there be such, con- 
stitutes theology and part of metaphysics. I am not, of course, 
here attempting to discuss the question whether there be a God 
or supreme unity, and whether there be any science of systematic 
theology. It is sufficient for my present purpose that a consid- 
erable number of intelligent persons hold that there is a real and 
knowable God and value the reality and knowableness of God. 
For such persons the being of God and the science which deals 
therewith have fact and truth values. And I think that these 
values are not the immediate emotional values of religion. A 
man may take keen interest and satisfaction in theological inquiry 
without having very much personal religious experience. Such, 
then, are the chief types of theoretical valuation. 

The practical value-attitudes refer to the chief types of overt 
action. The respective objects of these valuations may be valued 
mediately, because they are means to the conservation and en- 
hancement of other values, or they may, in some cases, come to 
be valued immediately, or on their own account. Normally, they 
are usually mediate values which tend to run into or be fused 
with the immediate emotional and theoretical values which they 
facilitate. The chief types are: (1) Technology, which com- 
prises all the methods and instruments for the adjustment of 
human life to the order of nature, and the control of this order 
for the conservation and enhancement of human well-being. 
These technological instruments comprise all the applied arts from 



400 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

engineering and everyday physical labor to medicine and hygiene. 
(2) The instrumentalities of social order and well-being. These 
are the methods and instruments for the regulation of our social 
relationships. They include all social customs and civil, political, 
and economic laws and arrangements, including the work of ad- 
ministration and teaching. In short, the whole machinery of our 
social life, when considered as machinery or instrumentality, falls 
under this head. (3) The methods and instruments for entering 
into right relationships with God. These comprise all forms of 
worship, prayer, meditation, and conduct, which may be regarded 
as practical means for gaining access to the supreme object of 
religion and for communion with Him. 

Finally, there are the immediate emotional value-attitudes. 
These valuations never subserve any more remote ends. They are 
regarded as wholly self-sufficing ; and other values, both theoretical 
and practical, are made subservient and instrumental to these. 
The chief types are : (1) The emotional values of nature, namely, 
the feelings of beauty, picturesqueness, grandeur, and sublimity 
aroused by contemplation of nature. The aesthetic values of nature 
represent to the feeling soul, which contemplates the harmoniously 
beautiful landscape, the picturesque waterfall, or the sublime 
range of snow-clad mountain peaks, a living harmony or unity 
of the manifold, a majesty of power or form, self-complete and 
self-sufficient. Similarly, the reproductions of nature in art and 
literature enhance these feelings by limitation and selection, by 
the exclusion of all discordant elements and of all features sug- 
gestive of natural incompleteness or lack of harmony and balance. 
(2) The emotional values of human fellowship or social life. 
Such are the feelings of companionship, comradeship, friendship, 
tender emotion, and love. These emotions, and others akin to 
them, are distinctively interpersonal emotional values. They run 
from the wider and vaguer sentiments of humanity to the nar- 
rower and more intense sentiments of the family and romantic 
sexual love. Their antitheses are the negative social feelings, the 
anti-social social emotions one might call them, since they, too, 
depend on interpersonal relationships. I mean such emotions as 
hostility, distrust, hatred. Every principal feeling, doubtless, 
has its antithesis, and there is a negative aspect to every form of 
valuation ; but we are now concerned with the primary and posi- 
tive aspects of valuation. The sum or, rather, the .organic unity 



PERSONALITY AND VALUES 401 

of the emotional values of interpersonal relationship might be 
called the ethical emotional value-attitude of personality. This 
would constitute the entire disposition of the person toward other 
persons. It is doubtful whether there is, in all persons, such an 
ethical unity of disposition, since in many individuals personality 
is very imperfectly achieved. The generally recognized moral 
values, such as truthfulness, justice, and honesty, are conceptual 
generalizations and incipient plans of action in relation to other 
persons, which have their root and origin in the ethical emotional 
dispositions of persons. Ethical dispositions have a conceptual 
or thought aspect, but, primarily, in their immediacy, they are 
emotional dispositions or tendencies to act. The degree of unity 
and harmony in the ethical disposition is expressed in the degree 
of unity which obtains in the interpersonal dispositions or senti- 
ments. 

Here, too, belong the aesthetic values of social and cultural life. 
In art and literature the emotions and deeds of individuals, the 
clashing and reconciliation of wills in society with one another 
and with nature and fate, are presented to the beholder in ideally 
self-complete unities of feeling and action. Art and literature pro- 
duce elevation, harmony, and repose of feeling in regard to human 
deeds and destinies, by lifting them out of the actual, by isolating 
them in a designed unity, and thus eliminating the incomplete- 
ness, the reference beyond themselves, and the discords, of the 
romantic and tragic episodes of actual life. 

(3) Eeligious emotional values. Communion or felt personal 
relationship with God would seem to be the final goal of all re- 
ligious thought and practice. Worship, prayer, meditation, are 
instruments or means toward the end of fellowship or communion 
with God. Inasmuch as the final object of religious value is taken 
to be the Supreme Reality and Ultimate Unity, religious experi- 
ence promises to afford the most self -complete, comprehensive, and 
satisfying type of emotional value. It is not surprising that re- 
ligious devotees have found in it that type of value-experience in 
which all other intrinsic human valuations find their union and 
consummation. Art performs a similar service for religious emo- 
tional valuations and for social emotional valuations. Art lifts 
religious emotions out of the imperfect actuality and sets them 
forth in their own harmonious unity, self-sufficiency, and self- 
completeness. 



402 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

I have not given a special place in this classification to aes- 
thetic values, for the reason that these values do not seem to me 
to constitute a single unified type. The aesthetic values are com- 
plex and varied, according to their reference to nature, or fellow- 
man, or God. All art is an instrument of social expression of 
emotions and sentiments. In art we find, besides the reproduction 
of the aesthetic feelings engendered by the contemplation of na- 
ture, the expression, with a freedom, harmony, and self-complete- 
ness, which is lacking in actual life, of the interpersonal emotions 
of social life. Creative art, in so far as it deals with human 
themes, lends an ideal grace to life, and the life is the life of 
men in its social and cultural aspects. 

The above classification of values involves, as do all such classi- 
fications, the sundering of things that in actual experience are 
found together. For example, social and religious values inter- 
penetrate. ^Esthetic values are found in close association with 
both social and religious emotions and sentiments. Ethical and 
religious values are found fused together. In the practical values 
control of nature and social control constantly intermingle. In 
the theoretical values natural science and humanistic science in- 
fluence one another's methods and conceptions, and both influence 
theology and religious metaphysics. The manifold interdepend- 
ences of nature and human society are reflected in the interpene- 
trations of human values; and, if the values of religion and 
theology are to be taken as real and intrinsic values, these values, 
by the very character of their objects and their modes of expres- 
sion, must interpenetrate with the values of the natural order and 
of human fellowship. 

What, in general, are the relations between the theoretical, 
practical, and emotional values? 

The practical value-attitudes are normally instrumental. They 
are means to ends. The normal relation between the practical 
and the theoretical values is that of instruments to the determin- 
ing conditions of their fashioning and operation. The successful 
outcome of the activities represented by the values of technology, 
law, politics, custom, and morality, depend on their conformity 
with reality, or, in other words, with the orders of existence rep- 
resented by the theoretical or truth-values. Truth of fact and 
truth of law in science are means to practical ends only in the 



PERSONALITY AND VALUES 403 

sense that they dictate the conditions for the realization of the 
practical and emotional values of action. 

In the case of the religious values, the success of the modes 
of action represented by worship, prayer, and meditation, de- 
pends upon the assumed conformity of these actions with the 
ultimate reality of God. A man may, indeed, believe in a cer- 
tain kind of God because he wants or wills so to believe. To 
worship the God whom one craves, and to feel oneself in com- 
munion with him, may be the most profoundly satisfying ex- 
perience of value that a finite mind can have ; but the continuance 
and meaning-fulness of this value is possible only if the God is 
held to be a reality, not a product of the worshiper's wishes. 

The general goal of the activities initiated by the practical 
value-attitudes is the enlargement, enrichment, and harmonization 
of the immediate emotional values of personality. Inasmuch as 
truth-values represent the determining conditions for such emo- 
tional or feeling fulfillment, we may say that the ultimate intrinsic 
values for personal deed and experience are the reactions of per- 
sonal feeling, in which the truth or knowledge which we accept 
or discover, and the overt activities in which we engage, whether 
with reference to nature, fellowmen, or God, bear their fruits in 
a richer, more harmonious, and continuing feeling-experience. 
The final intrinsic values of life are the personally possessed 
unities of truth and feeling. 

If this view seems to reduce truth and reality, which is the 
object of truth's reference, to the position of mere handmaids of 
emotion, it is to be borne in mind, on the other hand, that the 
emotional values of experience are progressively realized and 
conserved only in so far as they are the fruits of practices in 
harmony with the real constitution and course of the universe. 
Emotional experience or feeling, to be permanently and fully 
satisfying, must conform to the truth of things. If there were 
no real and determinate nature of things, independent of our 
transient feelings and wishes, there would be no reason why any 
desire or wish, or any number of incompatible desires might not 
all be fully satisfied ad libitum. If beggars could be choosers, 
we might all ride in automobiles. A false science of nature will 
not yield permanently good results in its practical applications. 
Laws and moral injunctions will be in vain unless they are in 
harmony with the actual constitution of human nature which, 



404 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

in turn, may be revealed in very significant aspects by social cus- 
toms, law, and morality. Even friendship and love must take 
account of the actual individuality of friends and lovers, if these 
values would endure. 

The immediate emotional values of experience then are not 
independent of the truth and reality values. The latter values 
yield their appropriate emotional satisfactions, and the former 
values, in turn, are sustained and illuminated by the truth values. 
Since the immediate unity of the personality is a unity of feeling, 
the acts and the truth-attitudes which yield the personal values 
of experience do so by being appropriated into and fused with the 
personal self -feeling. No purely emotional value is self-sustaining 
and no intellectual or theoretical value is without emotional color- 
ing. In their immediate reality for the person, all intrinsic 
values involve the union, with varying emphasis, of truth and 
feeling, or intellection and emotion. 

In this work of classification we have been dealing in abstrac- 
tions. If we ask what is the ultimate principle for the unification 
of values, and what is the final sustaining ground of values, I 
think we must answer, to both questions, personality ! 

Valuations, as incentives to and appraisals of actions, are 
simply attitudes of persons, affirmations which enhance and ap- 
praise experiences. Anything consciously desired and purposively 
sought is thus desired and sought because it represents some 
worth for a person either in private or social relations. I have 
not, in my classification, included a separate set of "personal 
values," because it seems to me that, in the last analysis, all values 
are personal facts and attitudes. And the distinction, so fre- 
quently drawn, between individual and overindividual values, is 
simply a distinction in universality, rationality, and compre- 
hensiveness, of content and scope, within the scale of personal 
values. A person is a more or less socialized and universalized 
individual, and, as such, may be described in terms of his valua- 
tions. These are measures of his degree of personalization. The 
choice of ends by a more or less rational agent depends on a 
series of judgments of value or worth. Theoretical, no less than 
practical, activities are guided oy the affirmation of a series or 
scale of life-values. The history of a man's valuations tells the 
story of his judgments on life and of his attitudes in relation to 
its varied experiences. In typical and contrasting forms of cul- 



PERSONALITY AND VALUES 405 

ture, such as those of China and Europe, we find broadly defined 
and differing standards of value in regard to science, social life, 
art, religion, etc. The history of the mutations of culture can 
be compactly expressed in terms of the evolution of valuations. 
This would give us a sublimated Kulturgeschichte. 

On the other hand, considered as immediate and effective 
realities, values are valuations, that is, affirmations and attitudes 
which exist and function only in personal centers of experience 
and deed. No formal logical and metaphysical principle for 
the final unification and cosmical grounding of values can be found 
outside the unity of personal attitude and experience. In the 
lives of finite persons there are two complementary and mutually 
indispensable features : diversity or wealth of content, and internal 
harmony of experience. There are, in actual developing persons, 
all grades of relationship between the diversity and the harmony 
of experiences, but in a sane self neither can be wholly absent. 
The growth of unity in diversity in the self can be expressed in 
terms of the organization of values in increasing harmony. The 
so-called overindividual values are representative of the more 
universal and rational intrapersonal and interpersonal attitudes. 
The "normative" or "ideal" values of truth-seeking and truth- 
knowing, sympathy, justice, love, beauty, holiness and fellowship 
with God, are generalized expressions of fundamental attitudes 
and contents of spiritual and rational selves. Spiritual selfhood 
or personality is actualized precisely through the affirmation and 
service, in concrete situations, of these universal standards or 
norms. In this sense, our definitions of ideal values and of the 
spiritual and rational self, are and must be circular. The person 
is the rational unity of conscious life, in and for which values 
are realized; and the person develops in and through the univer- 
salizing value-attitudes. 

The so-called "absolute" values or overindividual types of 
valuation can be nothing other than generalized formulations of 
the ways in which persons actually attain self -fulfillment through 
the progressive harmonization and universalization of their 
actions and experiences. Since there are overindividual types of 
intrinsic valuation, this means that persons are conscious indi- 
viduals whose vocation it is to unify and rationalize their lives 
by finding and afiirming certain universal interests and ends 
which belong to their deepest and truest selfhood. In other 



406 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

words, it means that the development of personality takes place 
through the effective working, in separate individuals, of certain 
common or universal potencies of reason and spirit. 

Some philosophers would confine philosophy to the analysis and 
description of values as actual functions and processes in experi- 
ence, and would drop all questions which might arise in regard to 
a metaphysics or ontology of values. If this be what is meant by 
defining philosophy as the theory of values, the limitation is, I 
think, an impossible one to carry out. Intrinsic values are, indeed, 
psychical phenomena and functions and, therefore, susceptible of 
a descriptive psychological treatment; nevertheless, by their very 
nature, they claim to be more than contingent psychical phenom- 
ena, or occasional elements in a phenomenal causal complex of 
experience. Philosophy, since it is concerned with the final prob- 
lems that arise out of the character of experience as fragmentary 
and partially incoherent, cannot be satisfied with an empirical 
psychological analysis and description of values. The problem of 
truth-value is the central one. For the value of truth is no longer 
valid, is no longer an intrinsic value, and has no meaning in con- 
trast with error, if truth be no more than an occasional, or even 
a frequent, product of a blind and unthinking complex of causal 
conditions. If truth be just a causal product in a psychological 
series, just one element in the psychical complex of finite experi- 
ences, this proposition is no truer than its opposite and there is no 
truth. A partially parallel situation obtains in regard to goodness, 
beauty, and holiness : although in these cases the situation is some- 
what different, for, if there be no intrinsic validity in truth, there 
can be no sense in pursuing farther the inquiry as to the reality 
and truth of other forms of value. 

To say that the problem of values is preeminently the problem 
of philosophy, means, then, that the fundamental philosophical 
problem is that of the relation of the mind's valuing, purposing, 
and attitude-taking in knowing, contemplating, doing, and wor- 
shiping, to the course of reality. And, we do not evade meta- 
physics, or issue in a new era of thought, for which these questions 
will appear juvenile, by talking about values, in abstracto, rather 
than about valuing selves. 

If all values are real only for subjects, what are we to say of 
objectivity in values ? The objectivity of intrinsic values consists 
in the basic fact that only through the quest and possession of them 



PERSONALITY AND VALUES 407 

can the higher life of selfhood be realized. While intrinsic values 
can have no actual existence apart from conscious life, and hence 
are real only as affirmed and enjoyed by selves, these values have 
an objective and constraining character; they possess over- 
individual validity. Moral and intellectual values, and I think, 
too, though less clearly identifiable, aesthetic and religious values, 
are objective structures in the life of personality. The evidence 
for this contention is that without the service of values, without 
seeking and attaining these, the higher selfhood cannot be realized. 
The objective constitution of intrinsic values constrains the indi- 
vidual who, if he denies or ignores them, does not become a 
rational and moral person. One cannot be a thinker if one ignore 
or deny the principles of logical thought. One cannot be a well- 
integrated personality if one ignore the moral values of personal 
relationship. One cannot be a full-bodied personality if one ignore 
the claims of aesthetic values. And the religious values in some 
form are simply the most comprehensive expression of the con- 
ditions of the harmony of the self with itself and its reconciliation 
with the universal order. Thus intrinsic values, as served, 
adjudged and enjoyed by selves, are to be regarded as a real 
existent order, a hyperphysical, objective structure. The essence 
of objective idealism, in contrast with subjective idealism, or 
mentalism, is the acceptance by the self of the valid authority and 
reality of an objective order of values. 

The Platonic idealism was the first thoroughgoing attempt at 
a metaphysic of values, and therefore remains the norm and type 
of all objective idealism. In Plato intrinsic values, which can be 
seen and served by men, are regarded as authentic revelations of 
the enduring order or meaning of reality. For Aristotle, too, the 
aesthetic-intellectual concept of the pure self-activity of reason 
represents the highest value and the supreme reality. Kant's 
whole philosophy is controlled by the concept of the moral value 
of personality and, in a more consistent fashion, the philosophy of 
Fichte. For Hegel the supreme reality is identified with spirit 
as the unifying ground of value. For him, the ultimate meaning 
of individual experience, history and nature, is the realization, 
through social life, art, religion and philosophy, by the finite self 
of its own individuality in conscious harmony with the absolute 
spirit. Anglo-American objective idealism, especially in Bradley, 
Bosanquet and Royce, has a similar purport. Recent philosophy 



408 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

of values in Germany, as in Windelband, Rickert and Eucken, 
seeks, too, in the objective and constraining character of spiritual 
values, the key to the meaning of reality. All great religious sys- 
tems, notably, for instance, historic Christianity, are declarations, 
in imaginative pictorial symbols, of the supreme validity and 
reality of an objective teleological structure or order of spiritual 
values; by laying hold on, serving and enjoying which, the indi- 
vidual alone realizes his true selfhood. And in all these doctrines 
of an objective structure of values, the individual is regarded as 
a socialized self. Some thinkers who make value the central con- 
cept of philosophy have tried to escape the necessity for a meta- 
physics of personality by having recourse to a "transcendental 
ought' ' (sollen) as the ultimate ground for the objectivity of 
values. How a mere "ought" or "should" can be the objective 
ground of anything passes my comprehension. To set up such a 
notion is an intellectually vicious abstractionism, of the same order 
as that which would ground all the reality, worth of personal life, 
in a "consciousness in general" {Bewusstsein uberhaupt). Pure 
universals do not exist and certainly not the most abstract of all 
universals, either consciousness or matter or being in general. 4 
The objective reality of values is that alone of qualities of persons. 
Whatever reality values have independent of finite selves they can 
possess only as essential qualities of a perfect person or community 
of persons. If we recognize that the willing service of certain 
values, such as justice, love, truth and beauty, are the conditions 
through which our spiritual or personal lives are fulfilled, this 
recognition implies that such values inhere in the constitution of 
ultimate reality and this implies that reality, at its highest and 
most permanent level is spiritual and personal. This position by 
no means involves the assumption that we or any other human 
beings have already discovered and realized all the values which 
existence makes possible. A human person is not merely what he 
does, but what he is capable of doing, 5 and being. "Persons can- 
not be understood by what they have achieved at any given 
moment ; their nature is to be realizers of value." 6 



4 This procedure is like trying to shoot a tiger by aiming at him in general ; 
very ineffective and dangerous hunting. 

6 Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God, p. 190./ 

• Ibid., p. 240. Cf. many passages in Robert Browning, especially Cristina 
and Rabbi Ben Ezra. 



PERSONALITY AND VALUES 409 

Indeed the relation between the human person's judgments 
and realizations of value and the objective order are analogous to 
the relations between his perceptions and scientific theories and 
the objective order. 

We do not know what the physical order would be like apart 
from the conditions of our experience. Color, sound, form, move- 
ment, etc., are real in so far as there are percipient selves; 
scientific theories of the physical world are valid interpretations 
thereof only on the hypothesis that our common perceptions are not 
illusory; scientific theories are approximating constructions of 
the physical basis of our experience which have value only upon 
the assumption that perception is not illusion. Similarly with the 
aesthetic qualities and, I will add, with the moral qualities. Logic- 
ally all qualities perceived and relations apprehended by us are 
on the same footing, although, by reason of the greater variability 
and complexity in the aesthetic and moral reactions of individuals, 
by reason of the fact that the tertiary qualities 7 attributed to 
reality are more shot through by feeling and, in the case of moral 
qualities, have more directly to do with interpersonal relations, 
there is a greater degree of subjectivity and disagreement in regard 
to man's aesthetic and moral interpretations of his world. But the 
differences are of "degree" and I shall contend at length in later 
chapters, that the aesthetic and moral, yes, and even the religious, 
reactions of human personality to its cosmical environment have 
as good right to be heard in making up a theory of the ultimate 
meaning of reality as have his perceptual data which go by the 
name of "primary" and "secondary" qualities. 

It is a prejudice, due to the overvaluation of the technical 
achievements of western civilization and the apparent superiority 
of mathematical and mechanical methods, that condemns aesthetic, 
moral and religious valuations as mere subjective imaginings and 
gives objectivity solely to mechanical schemes of nature. 

If we have the right to say that man's aesthetic, moral and 
religious sentiments are genuine data for the interpretation of his 
place in the universe it follows therefrom that, since the values 
inherent in these sentiments always have lodgment in selves or 
persons, the universe is personal or spiritual. 



7 iEsthetie qualities of nature are called "tertiary" by analogy with the 
and " secondary ' ' qualities of perceptual experience. 



410 MAN AND THE COSMOS 



ion 



We human selves discover values and in their realization 
become persons and thereby become richer and more harmonious 
finite embodiments of the meaningful and worthful life of the 
universe. Beauty, for instance, is its own excuse for being, not 
because beauty is truth and truth beauty but because it is true 
that beauty is a revelation of the soul of things. The same is true 
of justice, love, fellowship. And the most comprehensive religious 
value experience — communion with God — is that communion of 
the individual person with the cosmic spirit which grows in wealth 
and harmony with the growth of personality in insight, love and 
wisdom. For the deepest quality in man, that which makes him 
a person or spirit in becoming, is the capacity to transcend his 
natural or biological selfhood and to take on more universal and 
richer spiritual quality. Man is essentially a God-seeker, one who 
can become divine. This destiny of spiritual progress through 
self-transcendence is the deepest word of the greatest human 
thinkers. "Not my will but thine be done." "For me to live is 
Christ, and to die is gain." "Forgetting the things which are 
behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, 
I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling." 
"He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life 
for my sake shall find it." "Join a whole or make one." (Jesus, 
Paul and Goethe.) So too the doctrine of the union of the indi- 
vidual soul with the universal soul ; Plato's doctrine of the good ; 
Aristotle's contemplative life ; the Stoic life in harmony with the 
logos ; the mystic's contemplative and ecstatic union with the one. 
Through these and other one-sided or partial expressions of the same 
principle there shines one fundamental truth — the absolute prin- 
ciple of value, the objective ground of all values is personality, 
spiritual selfhood in widest commonalty spread. Whatever en- 
riches and stabilizes the life of spiritual selfhood and of community 
which is the atmosphere in which personality lives and moves and 
has its being, has value. The objective reality of all values is the 
interdependent life of personality and community. 

All values are relative, but not in the sense that no values are 
objectively valid. All values are relative in the sense that they 
are related to, have their ground in, personality. Some values 
are wholly instrumental and others chiefly so. Economic values 
are, from our standpoint, purely instrumental ; they serve the life 
of personality. Bodily values are chiefly so, since personality is 



PERSONALITY AND VALUES 411 

essentially spirit, but not wholly so, since body contributes some- 
thing directly to spiritual self-fulfillment. The values furthered 
by political and technical organizations are chiefly instrumental. 
On the other hand in so far as the nation-state, for instance, is the 
adequate expression of the soul and culture of a people it tends to 
become a genuine spiritual community. But the state, perhaps, 
can never be a spiritual community. The family, the group of 
friends, the church, are genuine spiritual communities and hence 
their values are not purely instrumental. They are means which 
become essential parts of the end — since it is in love, fellowship, 
and devotion that spiritual personality is realized. 

All values are related to persons and thus person-dependent. Is 
there a scale of values ? No, for this would imply that the values 
of life could be measured mathematically on a common standard. 
Personal values constitute a system, a harmonious hyperorganic 
whole; for the ideal personality is a harmonious spiritual whole, 
in which the principle of the whole lives in each part and each 
part lives only as a part of the whole. And the individual person 
can be such only as a member of the cosmic spiritual system, since 
the interpersonal and the intrapersonal values are interdependent. 
One can become a free and rational spirit only through member- 
ship in the ideal spiritual community. 

Some philosophers who make value the central concept of 
philosophy hold that, in place of a metaphysic of selves, philosophy 
should aim at a metaphysic of values — that the ultimate goal of 
thought is the rational faith in the supremacy of values. 8 This, 
it seems to me, is to substitute a set of abstractions for concrete 
actualities; it is to give way to the temptation to hypostatize 
abstract entities, when confronted with the difficulties involved in 
establishing on rational grounds a faith in the value and per- 
manence of conscious individuality or personality. Values have 
no existence as such ; in other words, apart from persons, integrity, 
justice, love, happiness, beauty and perfection do not exist. As 
Mr. Sorley puts it : "Moral perfection is of supreme value but not 
the mere concept of moral perfection." "The subject of values is 
always something we describe by a concrete term." "When the 
world is judged to be good or bad it is as the environment of per- 
sons." Thus when the question is raised whether man has any 

8 For instance Eickert, Windelband and Miinsterberg. 



412 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

reasonable right to believe in the supremacy and permanence of 
values in the universe, one has only put, in more abstract form, 
the question : Has man a right to a rational faith in the supremacy 
or permanence of a society of persons in the universe ? Has he a 
right to believe that rational individuality grows and endures in 
the cosmos and that the ruling order of the cosmos is the continuous 
fruition of a commonwealth of persons ? 

Beyond the harmonious enrichment and expansion of personal 
experience, as at once individual and universal, there is no prin- 
ciple discoverable for the unification of values. Values per se, 
apart from the attitudes and achievements of selves, have no sub- 
stantive existence. The evolution of values is the evolution of 
personality. Hence, in affirming and realizing the most universal 
values the self is discovering and affirming the conditions of its own 
spiritual and rational functioning. 

If the so-called absolute values have no self-existence beyond 
the interpersonal and intrapersonal affirmations of selves, it follows 
that there can be no universal cosmical ground and sustaining 
unity of human values, unless there be a cosmical ground for the 
lives of finite persons. Logical, ethical, aesthetic, and religious 
valuations can have no absolute basis unless personality have an 
absolute basis. The ultimate foundation of spiritual values must 
reside in a supreme self or nowhere. If personality have a meta- 
physical basis of reality, then ideal values may be permanently 
valid and effective in the cosmical process ; but the ground of the 
permanent validity of values must not be so conceived as to rob 
the evolution of finite personalities of all significance. 

In brief, the authority and persistence of the intrinsic values 
of human experience require the hypothesis of a supreme conscious 
unity and ground and conservator of values, that is, of a self who 
is the sustainer of all these values which are progressively dis- 
covered, affirmed, and realized in the social, ethical, aesthetic, 
intellectual and religious experiences of human persons. 

If ethical values and other intrinsic values that may be essen- 
tial conditions and qualities of personality have a cosmic ground, 
that means, translated into more concrete terms, that the life of 
personality is rooted and grounded in the nature of the cosmos. 
We cannot attempt further discussion of this question of all ques- 
tions until we have surveyed more fully the nature of human 
values and the general structure of reality. 



PERSONALITY AND VALUES 413 

I remark, however, by way of conclusion — that the course of 
evolution has resulted in the emergence and expansion of person- 
ality and its values; that teleological activity, that is, in man, 
activity directed toward the achievement and maintenance of 
values, is an obvious empirical characteristic of the world order, 
and that no doctrine of evolution which is to be adequate to the 
facts can escape employing the notions of direction, end, and value. 
No matter how human and personal values got into the evolu- 
tionary process, they are here, and, probably they are growing in 
wealth of content and effectiveness of expression. By whatever 
mechanism it may have happened, the evolutionary process has 
brought forth human and spiritual values, and it continues to 
manifest them to an increasing degree and with a growing wealth 
of content. It can hardly have produced them out of nothing and 
by chance in a blind chaos. It would seem that a humanistic prin- 
ciple, a power not ourselves making for personality, must have 
been at work in it all along. If so, the evolutionary process only 
fully explains itself in terms of its labor, however slowly and 
toilsomely the work may seem to be accomplished, to bring forth 
persons and their valuations of their experiences. If the process 
of evolution be not capable of some such interpretation I cannot 
see that it is explicable at all. For truth, the central determining 
value of conscious reflective life, and goodness, beauty, and holi- 
ness, the other determining values of personality, by their very 
nature claim to be more than occasional precipitations of cosmical 
weather. These values, and the conscious spirits in which they 
inhere and function, must claim to be continuously valid principles 
for the interpretation of reality," and continuously effective prin- 
ciples in the evolution of the same reality. Without the recog- 
nition of such principles, evolution is unintelligible, since intelli- 
gible change involves continuity of direction and of ends. It is 
precisely such a progressive continuity of meaning that is afforded 
by the hypothesis of the persistent reality and effectiveness of per- 
sons and their valuations. If intrinsic values are valid, and if the 
world-process has a continuous whole of meaning, then persons 
must, no matter when or how they may make their appearance in 
the history of the temporal universe, be true manifestations of a 
supreme personality, or, if the term be preferred, of a supra- 
personality. 



CHAPTEE XXX 



Ethics is the science of the intrinsic values of the individual 
life, when considered in its social relations ; it asks, what are the 
standards of good conduct that are desirable from the viewpoint 
of social well-being. Its business is to determine and interpret 
those ends of concerted human striving which are worthy to be 
sought on their own account, and to organize them into a har- 
monious system of social goods or values. If, therefore, moral 
goodness is primarily a quality of persons, if all moral values are 
personal values, ethics is a science of personality in a peculiarly 
intimate and full sense. We must first consider whether all moral 
values are qualities of persons. 

The moral judgment is passed, in the first instance, on acts, 
but, in its ultimate reference, on conscious agents regarded as self- 
determining and responsible centers of volition. Intrinsic moral 
quality or value can therefore inhere only in the dispositions and 
activities of selves. Material things and processes, wealth, social 
institutions, science and art, are not intrinsically or ethically good ; 
they are good only with respect to their consequences in the expan- 
sion and harmonization of the life of rational selfhood. Kant 
expressed this truth finely in his great saying, "There is nothing 
in the world, and, indeed, nothing that we can think outside the 
same, that we can regard as good without limitation, except the 
good will." 2 By will Kant means the personal disposition (Ge- 
sinnung) to choose and pursue ends with full view of their con- 
sequences. 

He does not mean a life of "good intentions," with which, as 
the popular proverb runs, hell may be paved. The supreme good 



1 This chapter is the revision and expansion of an article ' ' Ethics, Sociology 
and Personality" in The Philosophical Beview, Vol. xv, No. 5, September, 
1906; pp. 494-510. 

3 Kant, Metaphysics of Morality, Section 1. 

414 



ETHICAL VALUES 415 

is the maximum realization of the capacities for feeling and 
activity (including, of course, thought as a form of activity) of 
the socialized individual or person. Ultimately there can be no 
good which is not affirmed or experienced by selves, and no virtue 
which is not the quality of a conscious and free individuality. All 
moral values are functions of personality. For example, truthful- 
ness is harmony between personal thought and its expression; 
temperance or self-control is the subordination and direction of 
the sensuous appetites to the wider aesthetic, intellectual, and social 
aims of the self ; courage is the power and will to affirm in action 
and in suffering the integrity and supremacy of the rational self ; 
justice, the all-controlling form of social virtue, is the effective 
recognition, by a person or group of persons, of the intrinsic worth 
and inalienable rights of personality in other selves; injustice 
contradicts the nature of personality, since it is the denial to others 
of that worth which we affirm in ourselves ; and when, for example, 
we say a man is not just to himself we mean that he is ignoring or 
denying the intrinsic dignity of his own rational nature; wisdom 
is right judgment in regard to the relative values of specific per- 
sonal ends, and in regard to the determination of the right means 
for the attainment of these ends ; benevolence or active sympathy, 
friendship, and love are forms of that interpersonal feeling which, 
as we shall show more fully later on, is the very basis and goal 
of the richest and most harmonious selfhood. 

On the other hand, as we have already seen, persons are social- 
ized individuals. Society is an interpersonal mental world. 
Hence, moral values are at once individual in origin and enjoy- 
ment and social in reference and consequences. To say that my 
ethical valuations are social is another way of saying that, as 
ethical being, the ends which I value and strive for have to do 
with other persons as well as myself. I am a person only in a 
world of persons. 

Society undergoes historical evolution, and ethical valuations 
are both factors in, and resultants of, social evolution. The 
specific ethical goods, the virtues, duties, and rights, that are ex- 
pressed in moral judgments and that control moral activity, from 
period to period and from place to place in the historical world, 
undergo change in the cultural evolution of races, nations, and 
social groups, and in the moral development of individuals. It 
may truly be said that any social group — for example, a church, 



416 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

college, a labor union, a civic community, a nation, or, on a wider 
scale, an epoch of human culture, such as the apostolic age of the 
Christian Church or the European Renaissance — is a spiritual 
medium for the development of personality. In the moral evolu- 
tion of humanity it sometimes happens that the virtues of another 
age and race are vices and crimes of to-day and here. Contem- 
porary cultural variations in the content of moral judgment, for 
example, in Borneo, Japan, China, England, to-day, represent 
different levels of moral evolution. 

Moral valuations, then, are historically conditioned products ; 
culture-history, in turn, is the product of personal and interper- 
sonal judgments and acts. The significance and validity of ethical 
values in the concrete cannot be understood apart from their his- 
tory. And to trace the historical evolution of moral values in 
detail is a very interesting and important task of culture-history ; 
for example, from the morals of a primitive tribe to the social 
ethics of the Hebrew prophets is a long step, and a considerable 
step further it is from the Hebrew ethics of a theocratic society, 
in which perfect justice and love should reign, to the rational 
individualism of to-day. Here, however, we are concerned only 
with the general principles for the interpretation of the evolution 
of moral values in society and not with the details of social-moral 
evolution. Is there traceable in the evolution of moral values a 
well-defined movement towards the recognition of a rational self 
or person as the final bearer of values ? What is the relation of 
this historical evolution to the development of personality in the 
individual? Are there distinct levels or stages of social-moral 
evolution and of individual-moral development? Both questions 
I shall answer in the affirmative. Individual development is an 
epitome of social evolution. The moral evolution in society and 
the moral development in the individual reciprocally determine 
one another. 

There are three clearly distinct stages of social-moral evolution 
and of individual-moral development. First, is the "customary" 
social or "tribal" morality. At this, the lowest level of dis- 
tinctively human social order, men obey without question the con- 
ventional or customary rules of action of the family, tribe, clan, 
or city. The individual shows no critical independence in moral 
judgment. His practical consciousness is the echo of accumulated 
and consecrated tribal experiences and beliefs as to what conduct 



ETHICAL VALUES 417 

is obligatory, permissible, or impermissible. Conduct is guided 
wholly by social instincts and habits. No one thinks of doing that 
which is right in his own eyes. In fact there is a<s yet no con- 
sciousness of anything as being right simply in the individual's 
eyes. This first stage, the morality of custom and unwritten law, 
is illustrated by the customs of "taboo" in vogue among savage 
peoples, and by the morality of peoples in early stages of civiliza- 
tion ; for example, by the tribal morality of the early Hebrews and 
Greeks, and, to a very considerable extent, of the Chinese to-day. 
The social group and not the individual is held responsible. There 
is no clear distinction between the group and the individual in the 
matter of merit and demerit, or between morals and ceremonials, 
or moral and religious observances. Since human civilization is 
full of "survivals," one finds many traces of customary morality 
among the most advanced peoples. Indeed, one finds in highly 
civilized nations many individuals, who, for lack of inborn 
capacity or education, never get beyond the customary stage at 
ail ; they are guided and restrained in their actions simply by the 
social patterns which they repeat without thought and would not 
dare to question. 

The passage from the first level to the second level of moral 
evolution is brought about by the conflict which ensues between 
the desires and ideas of reflective individuals, who are becoming 
conscious of themselves as separate and free existences, and the 
morality of tribal custom and law. Historical illustrations of this 
conflict are to be found in the "sophistical" age of Greek enlighten- 
ment, in the Eenaissance, the eighteenth century enlightenment, 
and again, for the whole of western civilization, at the present 
time. A fine literary embodiment of this conflict is the Antigone 
of Sophocles. In and through this conflict of the reflective indi- 
vidual with traditionary custom, self-conscious rationality is en- 
gendered. Conduct first becomes a problem for thought. Without 
its "storm and stress," ethical self-consciousness is not born in an 
individual life or in a national culture. This stage of critical and 
reflective individualism we term the second level of moral devel- 
opment. 

The third principal level of moral development is that on which 
the individual has gained a critical insight into the rationale of 
social morality, and consciously identifies his own moral interests 
and standards of action with those of society, in so far as the latter 



418 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

are rational and coherent. At this level the individual becomes 
aware of the rational meaning and justification of social or insti- 
tutional morals. He finds a spiritual life for himself through 
action in harmony with the social reason, that is, with mind 
objectified in social and historical institutions. Historically this 
stage is exemplified by the political and social philosophy of Plato 
and Aristotle, and, in part, by the social teachings of the Hebrew 
prophets. Its most comprehensive modern philosophical expres- 
sions are the ethics of Kant and Eichte, the Philosophy of Right 
of Hegel, 3 and the works of the English Utilitarians and the 
English Hegelians, such as T. H. Green, Mackenzie, Bradley and 
Bosanquet. 

In the individual life the young man comes to see the necessity 
and meaning of "custom" and "law" in family, community, state, 
and church. He finds a more stable and rationally ordered inner 
life by obeying, and assimilating into his own feeling and will, 
social "law" and "principle" as indispensable conditions of social 
stability and well-being. 

But on the third level there arises the consciousness of the 
imperfect rationality and inner inconsistency of the actual social- 
moral institutions, in whose formation and growth reason has only 
worked imperfectly and intermittently, because hindered by the 
partly contingent and blind character of social evolution. There 
is now a sense of the failure of the existing and inherited social- 
moral institutions and usages wholly to meet the demands of the 
growing spirit, unless these institutions are rejuvenated and trans- 
formed from within by the insights and deeds of the rational self. 

Actual and traditional moral conventions, in custom, law, and 
social prejudice, tend to become ossified, and thus to arrest the free 
growth of personality. For example, the actual democratic state 
falls below the democratic ideal of a citizenship of free persons. 
Its working constitution fails to meet new demands of the per- 
sonal life. 

The actual state, community, church, or family, may retard, 
instead of furthering, the inward growth of a spiritual individual- 
ity. The community-life may be stagnant and mechanized. The 

8 It is true that Hegel one-sidedly emphasizes the complete rationality 
of social morality as all included in the spirit of the state or political society. 
Nietzsche, with his equally one-sided expression of the principle of individual- 
istic self-assertion, is the foil to Hegel. 



ETHICAL VALUES 419 

church may not respond to the higher intellectual and social con- 
science. The family may be blind or indifferent to the individual's 
spiritual needs. There may arise a clash between the conditions 
and usages of existing social ethics, and political life, and the 
"infinite" needs of the spirit; or the existing institutions may 
simply fail, through arrest and decay, to meet the demands of the 
rational spirit in its developing individuality. Such was the case 
in Greek life after the period of political decay set in; and the 
Stoic and Epicurean ethical theories were attempts to meet the 
moral needs of the individual loosened from his ancient social and 
political moorings. Such was the case in Judaea and in the Eoman 
world at large at the beginning of Christianity. Such was the 
case, once again, at the period of the Protestant Eeformation and 
of the Eevolution in Prance. Such in many relations of life 
seems to be the case at the present time. The existing confusion 
of moral judgments in regard to the ethics of industry and com- 
merce, of the family, of political organization, of credal subscrip- 
tion in the churches, of nationalism and internationalism, indicate 
that the inherited and conventional social standards do not meet 
the spiritual needs of individuality, developing under the stress 
of a multitude of changing conditions in the economic, political, 
intellectual, and religious spheres. Such confusion lays upon the 
thinking individual a new and inescapable burden of rational re- 
flection and independent choice. To-day the individual is pre- 
eminently challenged to stand upon his own feet morally and to 
trust for support to his own rational will. The moral personality 
must now, as in the days of the Stoics and Jesus, seek its fulfill- 
ment and fruition in a spiritual life that goes beyond established 
social and moral conventions in the interest of a better social order. 
In all advancing civilization the individual has doubtless met this 
problem, and the spiritual differences between culture-epochs are 
largely due to the -varying extent and depth with which the con- 
sciousness of the moral life as a personal problem may be felt. 

At this third and highest level of moral insight and endeavor 
the individual fulfills the demands of the established social order, 
in so far as these are not in contradiction with the social and per- 
sonal values, in the affirmation of which the thinking self works 
out, with reference to his unique situation and inner nature, the 
universal principles of a rational and free humanity. At this level 
the given customary and institutional system of moral values ceases 



420 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

to be ultimately authoritative and determinative. The ideals or 
values affirmed by rational self-conscious spirit are indeed social as 
well as individual ; but the distinction has now arisen between the 
moral life as fact and as problem. 

The highest stage in moral evolution is the birth of rational 
self-consciousness, in which the individual becomes fully aware, at 
once of his moral individuality, as this is denned by his actual 
capacities and social situation, and of the universal human and 
spiritual values that demand and must win expression through the 
medium of this very individuality of nature and uniqueness of 
situation. 

It is not meant that every individual, or any portion of the 
fcuman race which constitutes a continuous unity of cultural evolu- 
tion, must of necessity go through all the above-mentioned stages 
of moral development, in such fashion that all the stages can be 
clearlv marked out. Perhaps only relatively few individuals in 
a highly civilized society even to-day with full consciousness reach 
the third level. The first level may be so much abbreviated as to 
be scarcely distinguishable. China has apparently not yet passed 
into the second level, 4 whereas Japan is moving towards the recog- 
nition of free individuality. The earlier levels persist and cut 
into the later in the actual movement of cultural-history. These 
three levels represent the immanent logic of moral evolution. In 
the race, and in the individual, morality moves through these 
critical phases towards free and rational personality as its im- 
manent goal and spiritual principle of interpretation. 

Society's moral function is to crystallize into definite institu- 
tional form that minimum of rules of conduct which are necessary 
to insure the existence and perpetuity of some measure of stable 
social order. Society, usually in the comprehensive forms of the 
state (with its subordinate forms) and the church, is the con- 
server and transmitter of moral tradition and of the economic, 
intellectual, legal and political framework of the common life. 
But there is in actual society as such no principle of moral dis- 
covery and progress. These originate in individuals. There may 
be widespread inarticulate moral tendencies and movements at 
work in society, for instance, in the Koman Empire at the begin- 



4 This was written before the Chinese Eevolution. Demoralization means 
de-moresation," the disintegration of customary code of morality. 



ETHICAL VALUES 421 

ning of the Christian era. Indeed, without such ripeness of the 
time no new ethical movement could make headway. But the 
existence of such tendencies means that many individuals or 
groups of individuals have common aspirations and longings that 
await articulate expression and satisfaction. And such tendencies 
do not become efficient forces in social and ethical progress until 
they get definite and powerful expression through creative person- 
alities who transcend, by their force in conceiving and applying 
an ideal, their own existential state as part of the empirical social 
order. 

In ethics, as in religion, philosophy, and art, progress emanates 
from the actions of great or socially creative personalities. The 
mainspring of ethical discovery and progress, then, is an over- 
social and ideal force in the individual. Neither goodness nor truth 
is furthered or determined by merely counting heads. And this 
over-social and ideal principle of personal conduct will enjoin new 
social attitudes that, in reference to the existing order, represent 
a higher social ideal. But it may also enjoin attitudes that have 
no obvious application to any actual social order. It is no doubt 
true that the great bulk of our ideas and activities as moral beings 
have a direct social reference, and that, practically, it is better that 
the social aspects of our actions should be emphasized, since we 
are not usually in danger of neglecting those goods which make 
the strongest appeals to our private interests. This consideration 
does not, however, affect the principle that the free and rational 
activity of persons is the highest stage of ethical development. 

Personality is the central and determining standard of value in 
all moral progress. We cannot fully describe, in set terms, what 
it is to be a moral personality in the concrete; but we may define 
a moral person as a rational self-determining individual who, by 
his own initiative, strives to transcend mere custom or convention 
and to lift himself and others into a spiritually richer and more 
harmonious life, while faithfully performing the duties of his 
station. 

A clear evidence that the self -determining individual is the 
central principle of value in social evolution may be found in the 
general identification of the significance of any great historical 
civilization with the work and characters of its outstanding per- 
sonalities. In the general mind Moses, Isaiah and the other 
prophets, Jesus, Paul, and John stand for the spiritual qualities 



422 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

of Hebrew civilization. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Homer, 
iEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, stand for Greek culture. 
Anselm, the great Mystics, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante stand 
for mediaeval culture. Petrarch, Leonardo da Vinci, Michel- 
angelo, Eaphael and a few others represent the civilization of the 
Italian Kenaissance. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Cranmer, Bidley 
and Latimer represent the Protestant Eeformation. 

These are a few illustrations of the general principle that the 
worth and meaning of any great movement of human social evolu- 
tion is represented and summed up in its great outstanding per- 
sonalities. Social progress and social good are meaningless and 
unreal, except in so far as they are concreted in persons. The 
respect paid to personality, and the scope allowed for its free 
development, are the truest measures of the moral quality of a 
culture, the true standards of human progress. The reflective life 
of self-determining persons is the only absolutely worthful reality 
we know. Therefore Kant rightly says, "Act so as to treat 
humanity, whether in thine own person or in the person of another 
always as an end and never merely as a means," 5 and Hegel, "Be 
a person." 

The moral development of personality is a dialectic movement 
or growth through contrast, in which there are two constant terms, 
sometimes in opposition and at other times in harmony — the indi- 
vidual with his unique feelings, his private desires and interests ; 
and the social order with its over-individual demands and sanc- 
tions. As a matter of fact the conflict is chiefly between wider 
and narrower, deeper and shallower, social interests in which the 
individual's life is implicated, not between an atomic or socially 
isolated individual and the social order. Normally, there is no 
such being as an atomic individual. The individual as a rational 
judge of conduct in a critical situation which has a unique char- 
acter, as the never-to-be repeated situation of just this person here 
and now, transcends the actual moral traditions of society. In 
this sense every consciously ethical act of a person which involves 
reflection and choice of alternatives has an individual and unique 
character. On the other hand the moral life of man is an inter- 
personal life. We feel both natural impulses and moral obligations 
to promote the welfare of other persons. The great moral leaders 

5 Critique of Practical Reason. 



ETHICAL VALUES 423 

of the race have always rightly insisted that the good life is to be 
found in communion with other lives and in devotion to wider 
rational and social interests. 

This mutual dependence and reciprocal influence of ego and 
alter or, more accurately, of the individual's various "selves," in 
conduct is the dialectic of the ethical life. Intrinsic ethical goods 
are forms of self-realization, and the supreme good is the maximum 
organic unity or harmony of personal life functioning in a diver- 
sity of activities. Now, it is at once the supreme paradox and the 
inescapable law of ethical personality that it finds the highest 
values of life in devotion to over-individual ends, whether in the 
promotion of the immediate welfare of other persons or of more 
impersonal forms of life, such as science, art, industry, the state, 
the church, the local community. 

In such cases the realization of an intrinsic good involves the 
transcendence, in action, by the individual of his present exis- 
tential state, and, in this act of self-transcendence, the immanent 
presence in him of a rational or universal spirit. 

Ethics must, on the one hand, recognize the unique significance 
of the person ^s the source of ideal valuations and of action in 
harmony with such valuations ; on the other hand, ethics must take 
account of the social institutions or culture forms, which are 
created and modified by the historical activity of persons, and 
through which these attain rational self-consciousness. The 
rational life of selves is bipolar — at once individual and social, in 
ever varying relations and proportions. The ethical life is not 
a special department of the growth of personality. It is the whole 
development of personality in relation with the historical moral 
institutions of family and society, state and religion, science and 
art. 

The highest good is definable only in very general terms as the 
greatest possible harmony of intrinsic personal and interpersonal 
goods or values ; and intrinsic goods we have already discovered to 
be manifold and various. Any disposition or activity which em- 
bodies or promotes the functioning of some intrinsic capacity of 
a sentient and rational self is ethically good, provided thereby some 
more worthful quality is not injured or thwarted. What specific 
quality or capacity of a person shall be judged more worthful, 
when the simultaneous functioning of two or more tendencies is 
incompatible, can only be determined empirically with reference 



424 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

to the concrete and individual case. The only general criterion 
that can be set up is that of the greatest possible harmony, or 
balance and proportion, consistent with the least possible suppres- 
sion or destruction of any integral personal capacity, and with the 
dominance of the universal or rational values of living. The 
ethical good is far from being always identical with empirical and 
obvious social good. For example, mutual personal service and 
intercourse, civic cooperation and social peace are ethical goods; 
but the aesthetic and scientific culture of the individual, his critical 
freedom and independence of mind, in short, individual self- 
reliance in judgment and action, are equally ethical goods. In 
ages like our own, inner self-possession and poise, and the intellec- 
tual power critically to preserve independence of thought in the 
face of the blind tendencies of the social mass, seem particularly 
important ethical goods. 

Ethical values are affirmations of an ideal selfhood — a spiritual 
individual whose fundamental capacities get full play, whose 
action is reflectively or rationally autonomous, not blindly and 
chaotically impulsive; whose active tendencies work together 
toward fuller and richer harmony of insight and feeling. In 
specific cases the fullness of activity and harmony of feeling sought 
may have primary reference to the self's own internal functioning, 
to the harmony of its physical and psychical natures, to the like 
condition in other selves ; or to the emotional and active relations 
between the self and other selves. In its more comprehensive 
ethical insights and deeds, the self transcends all these partial 
forms of moral action and feeling. It sees and affirms the rela- 
tion of these partial ends as contributory to a more universal or 
ideal interpersonal experience, to fullness of action and balance of 
feeling in a harmonious totality which overcomes the oppositions 
of ego and alter. It is in obedience to overindividual ends or 
universal values that the personal life attains self-realization. 

The moral person is more than a socialized individual. No 
one has attained full consciousness of personality, as the standard 
of ethical values, who has not passed beyond the demands of con- 
ventional social requirements in his moral insight. Even the 
principle of personal service of one's fellows, ennobling though it 
be, is of fullest value only when the self who serves recognizes that 
moral selfhood requires the independent adventure of serving with 
his unique individuality. If the final principle of ethical valua- 



ETHICAL VALUES 425 

tion be the harmonious development and energizing of personal r 
capacities to think and feel and do, this end can be served in 
society only by him who has found himself as a self-determining 
and self-transcending or progressing person, and who sees and 
serves the vision of an ideal society of selves, in which the universal 
values of justice, self-control, rational insight, wisdom and love 
are incarnated. The moral self is more than social, otherwise 
society would never rise to higher levels. Moral personality is a 
creative principle, by virtue of which the individual is able to go 
beyond what he actually is or what other selves actually are. 
Moral personality is a spiritual possibility of progress, an ideal - 
that is more real and effective than the actual, an "ought to be" 
that breaks and remakes the "is," a dream which shatters and 
reshapes the brute facts of the sensuous and conventional life. 
This paradox of the ethical life carries us beyond actual morality 
to the metaphysical implications of moral selfhood. It implies the 
recognition in the empirical individual of a spiritual power of 
action that transcends the actual state of the individual life and 
the actual moral status of society. The life of ethical striving 
makes men members of a metahistorical order of reality. The 
perfected self which ought to be and can be, but which is not yet 
empirical fact, is a selfhood that belongs to a transcendent rational 
and spiritual order which is nevertheless immanent in the actual 
order. Kant was right in his insight that the moral self as the 
free servant of duty, the inner law of practical reason, is a member . 
of the intelligible or noumenal order of reality. Here, at the 
limits of the actual, the moral self finds itself en rapport with a 
deeper order of reality and one which holds the key to the final 
meaning of personality. 

The self, to be truly moral, must be more than moral. It must 
pass beyond the oppositions of good and bad, of ideal and actual, 
to find and live in the ultimate spiritual reality which enables the 
good to transform the bad, the ideal to control the actual. 

The full interpretation of the meaning of moral personality 
thus brings us to the portals of religion and metaphysics. 

The moral attitude in man is one of striving towards a state of 
perfection, of seeking the far country of the spirit. This attitude 
involves, at once, a consciousness of the goal of moral endeavor, a 
consciousness of the gap between the personal will and the goal it 
seeks, and the persistent resolve to cross that gap. Now, the whole 



426 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

seriousness and significance of the moral life in man rests on the 
faith latent in it, not only that the goal can be attained, not only 
that the breach between the "is" and the "ought-to-be" can be 
healed ; but that it is already healed, that the good is the supreme 
reality, that the "ought-to-be" now and eternally "is." 

In short the moral attitude in man strives for a conclusion 
which, when reached, would be its own euthanasia, and, moreover, 
presupposes that this conclusion is already somehow somewhere 
reached. The moral point of view, then, cannot be final. Perfect 
goodness can be realized only in a spiritual state which goes 
beyond it. In this respect the religious attitude is the full fruition 
of the moral attitude. The religious attitude presupposes, not 
only that the morally good will be achieved, but that it already 
rules in the universe at large ; not only that the right will prevail 
but that it must and does now prevail, all appearances to the con- 
trary notwithstanding. And, in religious experience, in faith and 
communion with God, the individual feels himself to be in contact 
with, and in very possession of, this ultimate spiritual reality for 
which the good is no longer a far-off divine event but a present and 
ever-abiding reality. Nevertheless, while the religious attitude 
transcends and completes the moral attitude it does not do so by 
abolishing the latter; rather the religious attitude absorbs into 
itself the moral attitude. The ethical will passes into its fruition 
only as it is taken up into the experience of supermoral perfection. 
The faith in the supremacy of the moral ideal, the conviction that 
the "ought-to-be" really "is," does not render the moral activity of 
the finite self of no effect. All that this faith need imply, from the 
ethical point of view, is that, in his moral activities, man is work- 
ing in harmony with the supreme cosmic meaning. This is the 
expression of the insight that a life which has lived through and 
transcended its moral struggle, is a richer, more self -complete form 
of goodness than one still immersed in the struggle, still fighting with 
uncertain issue. In communion with the highest good man tran- 
scends the moral point of view. Eeligion means, in its highest 
forms, the conviction of the final conservation of personal values 
in a harmonious experience in which the "ought-to-be" no longer 
is the controlling principle, since what ought to be is transcended 
and fulfilled in what is. The ultimate reality, which the moral 
agent and the philosopher seek, is found as immediate spiritual 
experience in all genuine and spiritual religion. 



CHAPTEK XXXI 

FEELING AND VALUES 

All feeling is either incipient or completed action. No sharp 
line of demarcation can be drawn between affection and conation, 
feeling and will. Volition is incited by affection. The raw ma- 
terials of action consist of the primal feeling-impulses — the 
instincts and desires, and the subjective terminus of action is always 
an immediate feeling-state or affection, in which consciousness is 
suffused with satisfaction or rent by dissatisfaction, according as 
action has proved successful or the reverse. In the life history 
of the individual and the race the emotional and appetitive tenden- 
cies antedate, in their manifestations, the specifically intellectual, 
and in the purposive activities of intelligent life the intellectual 
element is continually being made subservient to emotion. Feeling 
or affection is, preeminently, the individuating factor of conscious- 
ness. The primacy and uniqueness of the self is primarily that of 
a felt unity, not a reflectively cognized unity. Whereas perception 
and reasoning are regarded as shared and public processes (of ex^ 
perience), emotion — and, indeed, all affection — is private, un- 
shared, exclusive. You and I may agree that we perceive the same 
beautiful maiden, but I can never agree that our love for her is the 
same. My felt aspirations after knowledge or fame are my own 
private experiences. The individual's affections and emotions are 
the matrix of his consciousness of selfhood. Moreover, besides 
their individuating function in their centers of origin, the ele- 
mental emotions are individuating and exclusive in reference. 
The object of the emotional reaction is always individualized. No 
one fears, hates, loves, or envies things in general. One fears, 
hates, loves, or desires always a particular thing or person. The 
object of emotion is the object of an exclusive interest. We shall 
see, however, that the affectional life is also capable of generaliza- 
tion and that the "sentiments" may be regarded as generalized 
emotional tendencies. The emotional life takes on ideal values, 

427 



428 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

it acquires social value and meaning, just in so far as it is sub- 
limated and transformed into rational attitudes. Indeed, the sense 
of general values attributed to objects of direct experience or of 
idealizing thought is, perhaps, the most striking case of emotional 
generalization. Just as the "concept" is the "percept" generalized 
by the activity of reason, so the "sentiment" is the emotion univer- 
salized by reason. Predication through sentiments or judgments 
of feeling are the ultimate sources of those appreciations, or 
affirmations of value, by which experience finds its final appraisal 
and meaning for personality. The history of the felt valuations 
that are expressed in the lives of individuals, societies, and culture- 
systems may be traced out, and one may find a logic or rationale 
in the evolution of these emotional appraisals; but, in the last 
resort, for the individuals, societies, and cultures in question, the 
appeal in regard to the relative values of activities,, whether per- 
taining to scientific, moral and legal, religious, or aesthetic affairs, 
or to the intimately personal matters of sex and family, is always 
an appeal to judgments of sentiment or feeling. 1 

Affection or feeling is always the reference of some psychical 
content — for instance, a plan of action, an idea of past action or of 
a future state of the self, in some practical and social or contem- 
plative relation — to the immediate unity of the self's life, and this 
reference is always accompanied by pleasure or pain, harmony or 
discord. 2 But feeling is far from being solely a matter of pleasant- 
ness and painfulness, although pleasure and pain are its most 
generic attributes. Pleasantness and unpleasantness of feelings 
differ qualitatively at various levels of psychic development. 
There is a wide range of qualitative diversity, from the sensuous 
pleasures of mere touch to the ideal pleasures of logical reasoning, 
moral heroism, or philosophical speculation. For example, the 
sensuous pleasure of eating plum-pudding and the ideal pleasure 
of reading Matthew Arnold's poetry are so different qualitatively 
as to be incomparable. The qualitative differences in feeling and, 
hence, in pleasantness and unpleasantness, are dependent on the 
specific differences of psychic contents and activities, as these are 



1 In the present work the term "feeling" is always used as equivalent to 
' ' affective consciousness. ' ' 

2 ' ' Feelings are immediately experienced qualities or determinations of the 
ego. They are consequently absolutely subjective. " Th. Lipps, Leitfaden der 
Psychotogie, pp. 16, 17. 



FEELING AND VALUES 429 

experienced in their relations to the unity of the self. I desire to 
act in a certain way — it may be to lead a dance or to lead a political 
party. My situation develops in such a manner that the thought 
contents presented in my mind engender the feeling of the actual 
failure or success of my desire and plan. In such a case the 
reaction of the self as a unique feeling center carries with it a 
pleasure or pain distinct in quality from that which would follow 
on my success or failure in getting invited to a fine dinner or in 
writing this chapter. Each activity or thought-content gets its 
own specific emotional coloring in relation to the massive central 
feeling reaction. Feeling is a function of two variables, the 
specific ideational and motor content of consciousness, and the 
unique emotional selfhood which has these contents. The presenta- 
tional and reflective contents of personal feeling include, of course, 
a vast range of experiences — organic sensations of many sorts, such 
as visceral and thoracic sensations, sensations of strain, tension, 
trembling, coldness, hotness, etc. We are not concerned here with 
psychological analysis or physiological explanation of emotions. 
From our present standpoint, the affectional or feeling qualities, 
which color these psychic contents, are the emotional reactions of 
the self. By these reactions the self suffuses its presented contents 
with appreciations and values. These emotional reactions express 
and differentiate individualities. One man carries out the train 
of activities involved in angling with the fly in a cool, deliberate 
fashion. His emotional reaction may be deep, but it is placid, or 
its exuberance is held in reserve until the "game" is over. Another 
explodes emotionally with every variation in his angling fortunes. 
In a similar fashion, intellectual contents or "ideas," are 
presentations or psychic facts to which the self as central mass of 
feeling reacts. The ideas are colored, shot through, sometimes 
even completely suffused and transformed, by the emotional re- 
action of the self. In this case, just as in the case of overt action, 
the intimate and immediate meanings, values, or appreciations, 
which ideas get, arise in the central self -feeling, and the differences 
in degree and kind of the emotional response which different indi- 
viduals make to presented ideas notoriously vary, as every ob- 
servant teacher knows well. When the psychic content in idea or 
movement is one's own, and is felt as such, it is suffused with feel- 
ing of some sort and degree, and the sort and degree of feeling is 
the index of one's emotional individuality. 



430 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

When the element of reflective consciousness is absent from 
them, the emotional conative tendencies of the self are simple im- 
pulses and instincts. Impulse is a single congenital tendency, and 
instinct a train of congenital tendencies, to act without conscious 
purpose or foresight. In the development of the self's affective 
life, thought reacts upon and modifies the elemental feeling- 
impulses, instincts, and desires. At the more reflective levels of 
personal life, overt action and trains of thought are incited, im- 
pelled, and accompanied by feelings or emotional states more 
complex, more generalized, and more stable than the rudimentary 
impulses and instincts. Under the influence and direction of re- 
flective thinking, the elemental feeling-impulses and desires 
become more articulated and harmoniously organized. Through 
inhibition, organization, and reflective enlargement, they are trans- 
formed into more permanent intellectualized emotional disposi- 
tions. These idealized and organized emotional tendencies we 
have called "sentiments. " Their development can be illustrated in 
the growth of any feeling. Sexual impulse and crude emotion, for 
example, becomes transformed into romantic love and enduring 
passion for an individual. Curiosity becomes the stable sentiment 
of wonder, the animating spirit of scientist and philosopher. 
Mere "organic" sympathy becomes the habitual and intelligent 
attitude of the enlightened philanthropist and social worker, the 
religious emotion of fear is transformed into reverence and ador- 
ation. 

At the highest stage, no less than at the crudest, human action 
is incited and impelled by feeling ; at the crudest by mere impulse 
and appetite, at the highest by ideal sentiments. At first the goal 
of action is sensuous satisfaction, at the last it is the harmonious 
and highly organized emotional experiences of love, friendship, 
fellowship, delight in the discovery or possession of truth, the 
joy of communion with God, the pleasure of beauty. 

All along the line feeling is fundamental in the self. The 
primary sense of the unity of selfhood is in feeling. The basic 
relation to other selves (sympathy or antipathy) is a feeling atti- 
tude. Every kind of activity is incited by feeling and finds its 
fruition in feeling. We are in quest of insight into the nature 
of self as rational personality. We shall, therefore, consider only 
those types of feeling which seem likely to shed most light on our 
object. These are aesthetic emotions, and inter-personal emotions. 



FEELING AND VALUES 431 

^Esthetic feeling is particularly significant, for it is, par excel- 
lence, an intellectualized and organized emotion or sentiment, 
and is at once personal and impersonal, individuating and uni- 
versal. While all emotion is individuating, in the sense that it 
is the expression of the individuality of the subject and refers 
to an individualized object, aesthetic feeling is not individualistic, 
since it is devoid of self -consciousness or deliberate self-seeking. 
The sentiment of beauty aroused by a specific object may be 
highly individualized, inasmuch as the beautiful object possesses 
a high degree of individuality; but the sentiment itself is the 
reverse of individualistic. It is, rather, selfless in its tone. 

^Esthetic feeling, at its highest level, is the reference of an 
intrinsic or immediate value to certain experienced objects. It 
is this judgment of intrinsic value which concerns us in our 
inquiry as to the significance of feeling for a philosophy of per- 
sonality. 

At once there arises the need for distinguishing between the 
concrete aesthetic emotion, that is, the individual's pleasure in 
enjoying beauty, and the aesthetic appreciation or judgment of 
aesthetic value involved in it. 3 Our actual aesthetic pleasures in- 
clude nonaesthetic factors of purely sensuous origin. An aesthetic 
emotion always is pleasurable, but by no means all pleasures are 
aesthetic. 

In our concrete emotional experiences, aesthetic and non- 
aesthetic pleasures may be variously commingled. The pleasure 
with which I view an artistically arranged dinner table is a fusion 
of a genuine aesthetic sentiment with anticipated gastronomic 
delights. Komantic love contains an aesthetic element, but its 
pleasureableness is also in part of purely sexual origin. 4 The 
attempt to separate the nonaesthetic from the aesthetic factors in 
an experience which is qualified by the feeling of beauty is with- 
out doubt a difficult undertaking. Are pleasures of pure sensation 
to be regarded as devoid of all aesthetic quality? Is my delight 
in the greenness of a field or the cheerful warmth of the firelight 
unaesthetic? When the beloved appears beautiful only to the 
lover is the feeling of beauty nonaesthetic or does sexual attrac- 
tion create the illusion of beauty? It seems to the writer that, 

3 On this distinction see Groos, K., Ber Msthetische Genuss. 

4 So strong is this factor in so-called aesthetic pleasures that some thinkers 
have been led by it to trace all aesthetic feeling to a purely sexual origin. 



432 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

while a sensuous basis is required for aesthetic emotion, sensa- 
tion per se is not aesthetic. If the green field is beautiful it is 
because it means more than greenness. The beloved one is beauti- 
ful because the lover's emotion is more than mere lust. The lover 
is transformed into a selfless devotee by the very sentiment which 
transfigures the object of his devotion. 

It is this mixed and varying composition of so-called aesthetic 
emotions that is responsible for the proverb, "De gustibus non 
disputandum" The tastes which vary most widely are probably 
the nonaesthetic sensory factors. The aesthetic factors of form — 
measure and proportion, organic unity-in-variety or individual 
wholeness, rhythm, etc. — are the objective or shareable factors 
in aesthetic pleasures. The common recognition that there are 
standards of good taste, however difficult to define, is an implicit 
admission of aesthetic objectivity. The actual existence of beauti- 
ful, picturesque, sublime and tragic objects of enjoyment is recog- 
nized. This recognition implies a certain kind of reality in aes- 
thetic objects. What, then, is the objective or universally signifi- 
cant factor in the aesthetic emotion? 

The objective factor in aesthetic emotion can be determined 
only through an examination of the aesthetic judgment itself. 
Beautiful objects are regarded as self-existent and socially share- 
able objects. 

Since we are not dealing with the psychology of beauty here, 
we ask, not why are certain objects felt to be beautiful, but, what 
kind of judgments are implied in aesthetic feelings, and what is 
their meaning for personality? ^Esthetic pleasure is differenti- 
ated from nonaesthetic pleasure by its disinterestedness and po- 
tential objectivity or universality. The latter is a note of all 
aesthetic enjoyment. As Kant rightly saw, enjoyment of beauty 
is a disinterested pleasure, a selfless and shareable emotion. 
Hence the self attributes the quality of beauty to the object, not 
to himself. In this feature of aesthetic feeling lies the first ground 
for the objectivity of aesthetic judgment. The normal attitude of 
the observer is expressed not thus, "I feel beauty," but thus, 
"The thing is beautiful." Hence the felt beauty is conceived to 
be shareable and social, and beautiful objects are forms for the 
social expression of emotions. Beauty resides in the expression 
of a feeling in sensuous objects, not in purely subjective feeling. 
On the other hand, the object qualified as beautiful is always 



FEELING AND VALUES 433 

individual. ^Esthetic appreciation is intuitive or perceptive. One 
may come to enjoy Wagner's operas or Botticelli's paintings or 
Browning's poetry the more as a result of study and reflection. 
Nevertheless, the aesthetic appreciation of these art forms is, as 
direct experience, always intuitive or immediate and nonratioc- 
inative. Keason may enter into it, but aesthetic feeling is the 
concrete intuition of an individual whole. The aesthetic intui- 
tion shares with truth and goodness the quality of having intrinsic 
or immanent value, "Beauty is its own excuse for being." "The 
beautiful is the self -existent pleasant." (F. H. Bradley.) Beauty, 
truth, goodness, love, fellowship with God, seem to be the chief 
types of intrinsic spiritual values found in feeling. These values 
interpenetrate and share in one another's nature. Mankind has 
recognized the beauty of goodness in character, the beauty of 
holiness, and even the beauty of truth. Again there is believed 
to be a truth in beauty, in goodness, and in religious communion. 
The aesthetic judgment, in particular, implies that there is truth 
in aesthetic emotion. 



CHAPTEE XXXII 

THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS OF VALUES 

It will further our present aim to examine briefly the rela- 
tions between the values of beauty, truth, and goodness. The 
beauty which we attribute to truth seems to be due to an intel- 
lectual pleasure which arises through the discovery of harmony 
and proportion in the elements of a thought process, and in its 
outcome, viewed as an individual whole. When the movement of 
reason proceeds with order and symmetry to a balanced totality 
of insight, as in a mathematical theorem, the process and the 
result give aesthetic pleasure, because the harmony and consistency 
of the factors justify the whole. A bare abstract principle or 
law is not beautiful, but a group of concrete facts, or of more 
particular truths, seen in the light of a unifying and organizing 
principle becomes beautiful in its unity. The vision of unity-in- 
variety, that is of concrete individuality, gives rise to aesthetic 
feeling. Nevertheless, there is a contrast between the beauties 
of knowledge and the purely aesthetic beauty. For the systematic 
and harmonious whole of knowledge is never present as a single 
intuition. It remains an ideal. Knowledge is always ragged at 
the edges. It promises more than it performs. The single truth 
or group of truths always point beyond to an uncompleted system 
of truth. 1 The emotional value of truth is never more than 
partial and promissory. The actual attained truth ever points to 
its own self-transcendence in the unattained reflective grasp of 
reality as a harmonious totality. The object of aesthetic feeling, 
on the other hand, for example, Shakespeare's Tempest, Shelley's 
Skylark, or Keats' Ode to a Gercian Urn, has an individual self- 
completeness and self-sufficiency. In this nearer approach to self- 
complete individuality consists the greater emotional fullness of 
aesthetic feeling over that accompanying a theoretical cognition. 

1 This idea is the source of the philosopher's quest for the vision of the 
whole in thought. 

434 



THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS OF VALUES 435 

The aesthetic object is more nearly a self-sufficient whole. Simi- 
larly, the beauty of goodness consists in the pleasure due to the 
supermoral harmony of will and deed, of ideal and achievement. 
Beauty exists in character only when the moral struggle is over. 2 
It is only goodness which has fully attained the end for which 
moral obligation exists that is beautiful. Only the harmonious 
will is beautiful. When the self has reached this stage it has 
transcended the merely moral attitude, and goodness and beauty 
have become one. They constitute together a state of harmonious 
perfection, the fulfillment of personality. 

The claim to truth or objectivity which the aesthetic judgment 
makes is shown in the recognition of an obligation on the part of 
the observer to conform to certain standards of taste. When we 
inquire as to the source of these standards we must have recourse 
again to personal experience. For the characteristic of the beauti- 
ful object is that it yields disinterested pleasure. Hence, the final 
criterion of aesthetic valuation cannot be found in any definition 
of the aesthetic object as having an existence independent of human 
experience. Here, as elsewhere, the last court of appeal seems to 
be the experience of an ideal self. But, since this ideal is realized 
only gradually and progressively, and amidst a great variety of 
individual characteristics and environmental conditions, the cri- 
terion of the aesthetic values and the significance of the aesthetic 
experiences, are finally determined by one's notion of the spiritual 
vocation of man, that is, by one's conception of the meaning and 
destiny of personality. 3 This conception may be, in many cases, 
only a latent presupposition. Even thus, it is the final determi- 
nant of one's aesthetic, as well as of one's specifically moral, valu- 
ations. To the man who consciously or unconsciously practices 
the theory that mere sensuous pleasure is the end of life, aesthetic 
valuation ceases to be aesthetic, and beauty becomes a mere mini- 
strant of pleasure. Egoistic hedonism in ethics becomes in 
aesthetics the denial of intrinsic beauty. This degradation of art 
to an instrument of crass utility or sensuous indulgence has led 
fine ethical natures such as Plato and Ruskin, and, still more 
one-sidedly, Tolstoi, to judge all art in direct relation to its im- 
mediate moral efficacy. But, in truth, the aesthetic life is not 

i Cf. Schiller's conception of the "Schdne Seele." 

•In this connection Schiller's treatment of the place of art in human life 
remains unsurpassed. 



436 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

subordinate to morality. They are coordinate aspects of the vital 
unity of the personal spirit. ^Esthetic appreciation is an intrin- 
sically worthful function of personality. ^Esthetic endeavor and 
enjoyment are ethical goods worthy of pursuit on their own ac- 
count. Moreover, as we have already noted, aesthetic creation and 
appreciation have a moral side, and beauty is a medium through 
which the ideal freedom and activity of the human personality are 
expressed in sensuous form. Hence, beauty is an ethical or spirit- 
ual force in human life. The creation and appreciation of beauty 
are rooted in the movement of persons towards richer and more 
harmonious interpersonal experience. The aesthetic object ex- 
presses, in a typical and significant individual form, some phase 
of personal experience or emotion. Man is essentially social and 
must express in some fashion his most inward, full, and intense 
feelings. The artist or poet, who may sacrifice health and crea- 
ture comfort and live in poverty, in order that he may express in 
sensuous form some vision or ideal of beauty, thereby actualizes 
one phase of the higher or spiritual nature of man. His efforts 
may have a higher moral quality and more worthful ethical con- 
sequences than those of a moral reformer. For, in the inward 
attitudes and experiences of selves, truth, beauty, love and good- 
ness interpenetrate and become one. There is a creative imagi- 
native quality akin to the aesthetic quality in every vital theoretic 
and practical expression of the spirit. Every expression of spirit- 
ual activity, whether in religion, art, or philosophy, is the effect 
of the striving of the individual to communicate ideal values 
through symbols. All such supreme expressions of the spirit are 
compacted of the imagination, and, hence, have an aesthetic char- 
acter. In every utterance and deed the spirit employs the sense 
world as its instrument and so must express itself in symbolic 
pictures and parables. 

The aesthetic observer, as lover of beauty, lives over in his 
inner experience the vision and feeling of the creator of beauty 
in objects. The beautiful object has no existence for him until 
there has arisen in the intuition of the observer a sympathetic 
reproduction of the ideal feeling embodied in the work of art. 
Of course, this does not mean that the observer must reproduce 
exactly the mental states of the artist. He may not be able to 
relive the technical steps of production at all. But he must possess 
in some degree a sympathetic insight into the artist's meaning, 



THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS OF VALUES 437 

and be able to recreate in his own soul in some measure the spirit- 
ual attitude of the author. ^Esthetic enjoyment, so far from 
being a merely passive reception of external impressions, is the 
active and sympathetic re-creation in the soul of the observer of 
a spiritual experience, through the medium of an outer symbol. 
In so far as the observer of beauty possesses an aesthetic appre- 
ciation he sees into the soul of the artist. He is lifted out of his 
narrow selfhood and becomes one with all kindred lovers of 
beauty. My appreciation of beauty in painting, in poetry, or in 
nature, must always be uniquely my own; but, in so far as this 
aesthetic experience is pure and free from low motives, I am 
impelled to seek for others to share it. We normally desire that 
others shall feel the pure delights that we feel and that their 
eyes shall be open to the glories of our own visions. ^Esthetic 
appreciation brings a heightening and expansion of life. The self 
experiences in it an emotional widening and deepening, 

Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part 
Of me and of my soul, as I of them? 

There is an actual muscular and vascular expansion of the 
bodily organism in aesthetic feeling. 4 There is a trend of bodily 
uplift, as well as of spiritual elevation, in the contemplation of 
a glorious mountain range. 

^Esthetic feeling is over-individual in the sense that through 
it we burst the bonds of our narrow empirical individuality and 
are carried out into a wider and more harmonious life. ^Esthetic 
enjoyment liberates us from the petty interests of our everyday 
selves. In the contemplation of beauty and sublimity, whether 
in art or in nature, we are freed from the vulgar and the com- 
monplace, from the inharmonious clash and jar of actual existence. 
We are taken out of our ordinary selves and breathe a larger and 
serener atmosphere of harmony and freedom. In the region of 
beauty the ideal is not divorced from sense-experience, as it is 
in the regions of science and morals. In the feeling of beauty 
ideal and actual are present in a living unity of experience. 
There is here no conflict between fact and ideal, no disharmony 
of achievement and aim. Hence the purity of aesthetic pleasure. 

*Cf. K. Groos, "Der AesthetiscJie Genuss," Filnfte Kapitel; Vernon 
Lee and J. Anstruther Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness. 



438 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

No one has better stated these characteristics of aesthetic appre- 
ciation than the German poet Schiller in his "Letters on the 
^Esthetic Education of the Human Kace." "Beauty is the work 
of free contemplation. With it we step into the world of ideas 
without having left the world of sense." (25th Letter.) "Eor Art 
is a daughter of freedom and from the necessity of the spirit, not 
from the needs of matter, does she receive her prescriptions." 
(2d Letter.) "Beauty is Form since we contemplate it, Life 
since we feel it. Beauty is at once our state and our deed." 
"Beauty shows that passion does not exclude activity, matter, 
form, or limitation infinitude — that, consequently man's inevi- 
table physical dependence need not abrogate his moral freedom." 
(25th Letter.) The unique value for personality of aesthetic 
feeling consists in its living and self-sufficient presentation of an 
ideal and universal type of experience in the concrete harmony 
of an individual whole suffused with emotion. The feeling of 
beauty which qualifies our intuition of a painting, a poem, or a 
landscape, seems to be complete in itself. It needs neither justi- 
fication nor qualification. The experience is a whole, at once in- 
dividual and absolute, immediate and self-contained. The feel- 
ing of the sublime, on the other hand, seems to suggest more than 
it embodies, and so to carry the mind beyond its present experi- 
ence. It lacks the self-sufficingness of the feeling of the beautiful 
and has a closer kinship with moral feeling. Hence Kant said — 
"Two things move me to awe and reverence, the starry heavens 
above me and the moral law within me." 

iEsthetic feeling, then, is both individual and universal. It 
is a single perfect and immediate experience, carrying its value 
within itself and, thus, individual and complete. It unites, in 
the harmony of an immediate wholeness of feeling, the unity of 
thought and the variety of sense-experience, which are every- 
where the two poles of the personal life. And the greater the 
purity of the aesthetic experience, that is, the more fully inte- 
grated it is as just a feeling of beauty, the more clearly does its 
universal character stand forth as "disinterested" or selfless, since 
it is the embodiment of the ideal or "meaning" of personality. 
The aesthetic intuition has a universal or ideal quality, and in 
aesthetic theory this side of the experience has been designated 
the characteristic in expression. For example, the drama ex- 
presses universal or typical aspects of personal character. The 



THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS OF VALUES 439 

characters are individuals, they each have a "local habitation and 
a name," but they are the embodiment of typical human experi- 
ences and situations. Hamlet is the thinker paralyzed by over- 
much reflection, in a situation which demands action. Faust is 
the typical modern man, freed from all moral and religious tradi- 
tions and seeking an absolute, soul-satisfying experience of en- 
joyment under the limiting conditions of earthly life. 

In Greek Tragedy we have the conflict of ethical institutions, 
as of the family and the state in the Antigone, worked out in indi- 
viduals. In modern tragedy the persons who are the center of 
conflict stand more for themselves. They are no longer merely 
the vehicles of struggle between social and ethical institutions. 
In Macbeth, in Hamlet, in Faust, the struggle is chiefly inward 
and spiritual. The nature and destiny of personality is itself at 
stake, torn as it is by a conflict between emotions and impulses 
universally human. 5 The modern lyric conveys typical moods of 
a soul. Its note is personal. In Wagner's music-dramas we have 
the union of dramatic individual characterization with that 
yearning for a universal and infinite experience, which music is 
so well-fitted to express. 

The presence of a universal or over-individual quality in a 
concrete and individual intuition is further illustrated in the 
love for nature — the passion for the mountains and the sea and 
the primeval forest. Nature, as object of aesthetic contemplation, 
liberates us from the insignificant details and the harassing com- 
monplaces of daily life. In the contemplation of nature we are 
carried out into a larger life by which our experiences are enriched 
and the conflicting tendencies of our spirits are harmonized. 
And this life of nature to which we become united by feeling 
is, for us, conscious and quasi-personal. The nature-lover enters 
into intimate and direct relations with the spirits of the moun- 
tains, the forest and the streams, and, so long as he remains in 
the attitude of sympathetic appreciation, these spirits are real 
for his experience. 

We are now in a position to determine more closely the rela- 
tive functions of cognition, morality, and aesthetic emotion in the 
organization of personality. 

In theoretic cognition the self reconstructs and interprets, in 

5 See A. C. Bradley, "Hegel's Theory of Tragedy,' ' Hibbert Journal, Vol. 
ii, No. 3. 



440 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

terms of reflective principles, its universe of sense experience. 
The self thus reduces chaos to order, variety to identity, discord 
to harmony. In so doing the self is finding its rational nature 
in the world and thus, in its quest for truth, finding itself in a 
larger sense, hy going beyond itself as mere sensory organism. 
The function of cognition is the organization of experience in 
terms of reason, which is, at the same time, the organization of 
the rational self, the fulfillment of the rational will. This re- 
flective organization of the sense world is achieved at a certain 
loss. Cognition ever tends to sublimate the living, thronging 
variety of perceptual experience into a bloodless unity and iden- 
tity, to transform the world of dynamic and vital change into a 
dead and colorless immobility. With progress in the organiza- 
tion of cognition the gap seems to widen between the warm mani- 
foldness, intensity, and movement of living experience and the 
cold sameness, pallidity and inertness of theory. The "univer- 
sals" of science, divorced from immediate fact, seem abstract and 
unreal. 

In moral activity the individual strives to bring his will into 
harmony with the rational and social conditions of goodness, and 
to reconstruct his own inner world of desire in harmony with 
the ideal rational and social values of life. But here, too, the 
gulf yawns between the sensuous fact and the ideal principle. 
The deed falls short of the aim. The dialectic opposition of ego 
and alter, which lives within the self, since the self is a social 
being, is never wholly overcome. Sense cannot be quite subli- 
mated into spirit by moral endeavor. Struggle and opposition 
prove to be ever recurring conditions for the exercise of the moral 
will. The beautiful soul, which naturally and spontaneously 
utters itself in action that is perfectly good, and whose inner ex- 
perience knows no divorce between aspiration and deed, remains 
an unrealized ideal. If the beautiful soul were realized fact the 
moral and aesthetic would therein coincide. Sensuous impulse and 
ideal aims would wholly interpenetrate and fuse together. The 
contrast between thought and sense, ideal and actual, would have 
collapsed into one immediate and perfect individual whole of 
experience and will. The values of truth, goodness, and beauty 
would completely coincide. 

In the absence of such perfect coincidence, the aesthetic intui- 
tion of beauty, in nature, art, and human fellowship, affords to 



THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS OF VALUES 441 

us, by way of concrete experiences, forefelt anticipations of an 
ultimate harmony of sensuous existence and ideal values, of 
"nature" and "reason." For the aesthetic intuition is an indi- 
vidual and self-sufficing unity of thought and immediate feeling, 
of mind and object, of value and existence. In it the discordances 
of experience, are, for the time being at least, overcome. The 
aesthetic experience is a self-complete individual whole or harmo- 
nious unity-in-difference. It is wholly self-contained and of 
purely intrinsic worth. In aesthetic feeling our personalities 
are immersed and fulfilled in impersonal experiences. And these 
experiences are concrete and individual wholes, felt unities of 
the manifold, having a certain universal quality or meaning. The 
landscape is a harmonious unity of field, flower, and trees, of 
hill and vale, of brook and bank The picture is a harmonious 
unity of colors, forms and human expressions. The poem is a 
unity of articulate and rhythmic sounds, feeling, and thought. 

In contrast with theoretic cognition, in which the single ele- 
ment always stands in a systematic connection, such as that of 
a causal interrelation or a syllogism, and this connection again 
in other connections, which are never presented as an absolute 
and complete system, the aesthetic intuition appears wholly self- 
contained and of purely intrinsic worth. The value of the beau- 
tiful object lies not in its logical, causal, or economic relations 
to some one or something else, not in its suggestion and demand 
of a completer whole, but in the direct and individual embodi- 
ment, in this single and isolated experience, of the harmony of 
fact and value. The lovely mountain cataract fringed with pri- 
meval forest is a unity of form, color, sound, and movement, an 
interplay of sensuous qualities without purpose or relation to our 
work-a-day strivings; hence we feel its beauty. In union with 
it we are all liberated from the crass actuality of making a living. 

By contrast with the moral volitions the aesthetic intuition 
seems complete, since it is a state of perfect fulfillment in which 
there is no struggle to reach a goal, no gap between will and 
attainment. In the selflessness of devotion to beauty the indi- 
vidual will no longer wills anything, but is satisfied and fulfilled 
by its unity with the object. 

Unity of the manifold or harmony, disinterestedness or self- 
lessness, and individual completeness of its objects — such are the 
characteristics of the aesthetic experience. One other remains to 



442 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

be mentioned. The beautiful object may be a creation of art 
or of the imagination, and need not stand in any close relation 
to the actual world. Beauty need have nothing to do with man's 
work-a-day purposes, or appetites. The nature we love is not the 
nature of the agriculturist or the lumberman. The novel, 
the drama, or lyric poem, are not the stories of deeds and feelings 
of actual persons whom we know and with whose fortunes our 
own are implicated. Even the "realistic" novel, if a work of art, 
portrays a drama of human life complete in itself and cut off 
from our personal entanglements. It is just this absence of rela- 
tion to and dependence on the actual needs, disagreeable facts, 
and ordered cares of our own lives which gives the charm to ob- 
jects of aesthetic intuition. In them man is liberated from the 
thraldom of the work-a-day and commonplace world of weary 
trivialities, cares, and jarring discords. 

The aesthetic 'experience, richer and more self-sufficing than 
theoretical cognition and moral activity, seems to afford hints of 
how, in a higher harmony of experience, the theoretical and prac- 
tical functions of personality might find union and consummation. 
Nevertheless, as Hegel said, the limitations and hindrances im- 
posed upon them by their sensuous materials prevent the aesthetic 
objects from expressing the full life of spirit. Spirit can find 
and fulfill itself only through spirit. Esthetic feeling is one 
specialized form in which may be experienced the unity of the 
ideal and actual, the harmony of thought and sense. The ma- 
terials of aesthetic expression are not wholly fluid to ideal feel- 
ing. The materials in which architecture and sculpture work 
offer most resistence to the transparent expression of ideas and 
emotions. Architecture can express sublimity, grandeur, aspira- 
tion, even grace, but it fails to convey the complex shades and 
finer moods of human feeling. Sculpture can convey grace and 
beauty of form, even struggle and power and agony in human 
fate, but only in arrested immobile shape. It fails to render the 
dynamic and complex experiences in the development of human 
situations. It conveys no ebb and flow of emotions. The freest 
and most ideal arts are poetry and music, in which articulate 
and significant rhythmic sounds can express tragic situations, 
unfold dramatic movements, and depict evanescent moods of the 
soul. Music seems to yield the fullest expression of the infinite 
and the cosmic in yearning, pathos, striving, aspiration, consum- 



THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS OF VALUES 443 

mation and adoration. But no single type of aesthetic expression 
is ever wholly adequate to the rich complexity of personal experi- 
ences, volitions and sentiments. 

In the first place aesthetic expression and emotion are not 
independent of moral experience. The harmony of feeling which 
engenders the judgment of beauty is, indeed, not the same as 
moral feeling. On the other hand, the most significant and most 
permanent types of aesthetic objects — in the fine arts, literature, 
and music — always show moral proportion; they are always in 
harmony with the moral order of human life. The greatest art 
such as the tragedies of Sophocles or Shakespeare, Goethe's Faust, 
or Dante's Divine Comedy, are true to the ethical destiny of man 
as a spiritual or self-determining being, living in an ethically 
ordered Cosmos. The purely aesthetic attitude leaves untouched 
the problem of the relations of aesthetic experience to reality. And 
yet the highest beauty must be true to the meaning and destiny 
of the spirit. Beauty, to be a satisfying object of experience, 
must be grounded in the reality of the world order. It must bear 
witness to the meaning and destiny of spiritual selfhood. When 
we have said this we have raised the whole question as to the 
place of personality in the cosmos. This ultimate issue I shall 
not discuss at the present juncture. I desire, rather, to insist 
here that man cannot satisfy his spirit with beautiful illusions. 
The aesthete who cultivates the beautiful, without reference to 
its moral proportion and truth, finds his enjoyment turn to Dead 
Sea fruit. A world of beautiful illusion, however fair, would 
lose its fairness if it were wholly out of harmony with reality. 
Indeed, the positive presence of moral truth and the reference to 
the nature of reality which are involved in the ideal significance 
of beauty are clearly indicated by the over-individual demand for 
a selfless devotion, free from utilitarian taint, which beauty makes 
upon our intelligent wills. In this respect the desire for and 
the devotion to beauty are expressions of an ideal or absolute 
value which the personality serves and realizes just through the 
contemplation and creation of beauty. 

^Esthetic values, then, are not wholly self-sustaining. In art 
the ideal is present and is treated as semblance. 6 The demand 

• Schein it is called by Schiller and von Hartmann. ^Esthetic feeling can 
approve the living only as appearance, the actual only as ideal. Schiller, 26th 
Letter. 



444 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

of the spiritual self for a richer, more human reality can never 
rest satisfied with a dream-world, even of beauty. When we are 
immersed in aesthetic contemplation we do not raise the question 
as to the reality which our intuition symbolizes; but when the 
question is once raised, as it must be if beauty be vital for the 
furtherance of the spiritual life, the fundamental postulate of 
spirit's value to reality necessitates the assumption that experi- 
ences so integral to personality as beauty and sublimity must 
symbolize a harmony of organization that inheres in the very 
constitution of reality. The fuller and completer harmony of 
personal consciousness and ultimate reality must transcend the 
merely aesthetic attitude. On the other hand, the element of 
aesthetic feeling is an integral factor in every intrinsically worth- 
ful and creative function of personality. An aesthetic element 
interpenetrates all intrinsic personal values. Both knowledge and 
ethical conduct involve, in their fulfillment, aesthetic factors. For 
they are coordinate manifestations of the undying quest for 
harmony, for the ideal unity of the manifold, that runs through 
the whole spiritual life. The goal of all theoretical and practical 
activity is an individuated harmony of experience, that is, of 
immediate feeling suffusing a mediated system in which the 
varied contents of experience are taken up and unified into a 
rational totality. And so we find aesthetic sentiment entering 
into and absorbed in the feeling for nature, in romantic love, in 
friendship and in religious devotion. 

While, then, aesthetic intuition is a more complete and indi- 
vidual whole than either discursive knowledge or moral goodness, 
it cannot be said to absorb into itself and transcend these essential 
factors in the personal life. iEsthetic intuition does suggest the 
formal nature or general character of a more complete, self-sus- 
taining and universal intuition or experience, by which the human 
spirit may enter into the supreme meaning of reality. And the 
lover of beauty may see in the aesthetic insight the suggested out- 
lines of a cosmic harmony — of a world life proceeding from and 
sustained by the creative intuition of a Supreme Spirit in whom 
truth, goodness, and beauty coincide. In the most liberal forms 
of religious devotion the reality of this — the unified ideal of per- 
sonal values — is presupposed as in religious faith it is affirmed. 



THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS OF VALUES 445 

The Interpersonal Emotions 

The completest fruition of the feeling-life is found in inter- 
personal emotions and sentiments. Sympathy, friendship, sexual 
and family love, loyal love of country or a cause, devotion to God, 
these are the fullest, richest, most self-sufficing emotional experi- 
ences and attitudes of persons. These feelings furnish the strong- 
est and most enduring motives to action. They are the most last- 
ing incitements to will. And it is in these interpersonal emotions 
that man finds his most satisfying and most nearly self-complete 
values. The unity of two equal and noble souls in a lasting friend- 
ship, the lasting harmony of feeling and will in the devoted love 
of man and woman, where the grace and delicate fragrance of 
the woman soul is joined to the strength and vigor of the man 
soul, the self-sacrificing devotion of mother to child — such are 
types of feeling which have all the self-complete individuality and 
disinterestedness of aesthetic experience together with a fullness 
and a depth beyond all mere aesthetic emotion. 

Friendship, love, loyalty and religious devotion are at once 
the most universal, the most highly individualizing, and the most 
self-complete forms of emotional experience of harmony. They 
yield the most highly individuated and concrete kind of knowl- 
edge — the sympathetic intuition of other selves. Mankind has, 
in calling these attitudes "beautiful," recognized their kinship 
with aesthetic feeling. In these interpersonal emotions, for which 
we may employ the generic term "love," selves are directly and 
immediately unified without dependence on any external condi- 
tions of union. Love is the immediate intuition of spirit in spirit, 
of self in self. Interpersonal emotion is the completest, concretest 
and most highly individuated experience of unity-in-difference, 
the harmony of self and other self. 

Friendship, love, fellowship, religious adoration and com- 
munion, are the most richly significant and intrinsically worthful 
types of the over-individual unity and harmony of persons. They 
seem to afford the fullest adumbrations of an ideally self-com- 
plete experience. In love, friendship, and fellowship, the indi- 
vidual self s inner world is expanded and unified by going out- 
side itself and living for and in another selfhood. Hence these 
feeling-states seem absolutely worthful and self-existent. They 
are often imperfect and mutable, and sometimes they seem non- 



446 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

moral; nevertheless, in their immediate presence and possession 
change and imperfection are forgotten and the person seems to 
find the perfect and lasting values of experience. Indeed, these 
personal relationships are all akin to religions feeling and religion 
is, perhaps, simply personal emotion at its highest level of ideal- 
ization. The higher emotional states or sentiments — friendship, 
love, religious fellowship and adoration — do not involve the merg- 
ing of the persons related by them into one another. In these 
emotional unities persons are at once differentiated and united. 
These higher emotional states are the richest, most concrete, most 
highly personalized experiences of identity-in-difference. They 
are most concrete, since, while they are states of personal feeling, 
this feeling carries in its heart the unique cognition of another 
self, and from it there flows spontaneously action to express and 
maintain the emotion. 

In religious love or devotion this principle of the emotional 
unity of opposites, of felt identity-in-difference, seems to burst 
the bonds of finitude and mutation and to touch the perfect and 
eternal. Throughout the history of humanity we find that wher- 
ever man awakens to even the most vague and intermittent con- 
sciousness of the psychic bonds which hold him to his fellow and 
which constitute the emotional basis of society, he affirms the 
same principle in his relations with the supreme ideal — with the 
God conceived as the source and goal of the human ideal. Imper- 
fectly conceived, mutable, fruitful of error and crime though 
they be, the unifying bonds of personal emotion are ever pro- 
jected into and clothe in living form the ideal of the eternal, im- 
mutable, and perfect, as somehow one with the temporal, mutable, 
and imperfect. 

Such being, in general terms, the place of feeling in human 
experience and its function in the life of personality, feeling must 
inhere in the ultimate reality. The universe must feel; and if 
there be a universal spirit whose experience is the unifying cen- 
tral life of the cosmos, this spirit must feel, in a manner analogous 
to our feeling, and hence must be a self. Only a self can feel and 
only a psychic center which feels can be a self. What are for us 
pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, indignation, hatred, love, de- 
votion, beauty, must somehow enter into his life. And we may 
venture to affirm that the highest, most abiding, full and compre- 
hensive states of feeling will enter into the absolute feeling with 



THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS OF VALUES 447 

the least transformation. What sensuous pleasures and pains can 
mean positively for a cosmic or universal self it is impossible to 
say ; I have no inkling of what my toothache or hunger may mean 
for God. But a noble sorrow, a deep sympathy, a strong friend- 
ship, a devoted love, a persistent devotion to justice and truth — 
such personal emotions of appreciation that control action and 
give worth to living must have a very positive meaning for a 
universal self. While we must not forget that we speak anthropo- 
pathically we may properly assert that, since human experience 
is our only basis for, and human valuation our highest guide to, 
the interpretation of reality, the highest and most abiding human 
emotions must reveal an essential aspect of the cosmos. Whether 
the ultimate reality be one spirit or a society of many spirits, this 
reality must be a life of feeling, and human emotion must be a 
principal avenue to experiencing ultimate reality. The ultimate 
self or society of selves must, then, feel the joys and sufferings 
of finite selves; must enjoy the beauties and sublimities of its 
universe and of the finite elements thereof; must feel, in some 
way, the loves and friendships which bind finite selves into 
higher unities. A universe which felt no pain and sorrow, thrilled 
with no joy or beauty, and which was insensate to the fellowship 
of selves would be less than human. Its experience would be 
much poorer and less meaningful than that of a human soul. It 
is inconceivable that such a universe should bring forth as its 
finest flower, beauty, friendship, love, devotion and admiration 
in finite selves, while in its own innermost structure and move- 
ment these supreme experiences should have neither place nor 
meaning. 



CHAPTEE XXXIII 

MORAL FREEDOM 

It is common in discussions concerning freedom of action to 
assume that there is a special faculty in man called the "will," 
and that it is this faculty that is either free or bound. Thus 
people speak of training the will, exercising the will, using their 
wills, etc. There may be no harm in all this, as a mode of popu- 
lar speech, but in psychology and philosophy it is erroneous and 
misleading. There is no special faculty of will; the will is the 
entire self of the moment, the whole dynamic complex of impul- 
sions, sentiments, valuations and thoughts, in action either to 
achieve a desired end or to ward off an undesired affect. In brief, 
the will is the whole self striving to attain goods and to avoid evils. 

The concept of moral freedom must be distinguished from 
that of social liberty. 1 A man may be morally free and socially 
in chains, or vice versa. Furthermore, moral freedom is distinct 
from psycho-physical freedom, which is simply the power to ex- 
press one's aims through the instrumentality of the body. One 
might be morally free and physically bound, through physical 
weakness, or through being pinned down, for example, by a weight 
that one could not remove. 

The problem of moral freedom involves two distinct questions : 
(1) self-determination or the ability of the self as a unique being 
to will the ends which it values; (2) freedom of choice or 
the power of the self to choose between alternative courses of 
action. The second question may be put thus — granting self- 
determination, does it follow that a self could ever have chosen 
differently from what it did ? 

Practical moral judgments, as expressed in social responsi- 
bility, and in praise and blame, reward and punishment of self 



*Of course no one could "■realize" and enjoy moral freedom as a slave. 

448 



MORAL FREEDOM 449 

and other selves, assume at the moment of decision the power of 
choosing, at least sometimes, between alternative ends of action. 
Unless "the native hue of resolution has been sicklied o'er by the 
pale cast of thought" to the point of volitional paralysis, or unless 
there has been mental and nervous breakdown, men believe that 
they can, in momentous crises, choose freely how they shall act. 
Whether Kant's famous argument for freedom, "I ought, therefore 
I can," be valid or not, it is certainly a true and pithy expression 
of the attitude of a healthy moral consciousness. What this naive 
consciousness of freedom really involves is now the question. 

The psychological determinist argues that what I may choose 
to do at any instant in my career is the strictly determined and 
unavoidable resultant of my character and circumstances, taken 
in conjunction. I feel that I am free in the degree in which I 
am able to express my selfhood or character in my deed. I am 
truly a self-determining and self-directing being, in the measure 
in which my actual individuality wins expression. But at the 
given moment of choice I could not have chosen otherwise than 
I actually did. I think that I can choose between two or more 
alternatives now before my mind because, up to the instant of 
actual choice, I am ignorant of many of the subconscious factors, 
in the shape of impulse and habit, that determine the actual course 
of my decisions. The psychological determinist holds that our 
voluntary actions are not mechanically determined by external 
physical causes. But he also holds that every actual volition is 
a wholly determined psychical process. I may choose, now, with- 
out external physical or social compulsion; but "I," who thus 
choose, do so as the joint resultant of many, and chiefly unnoted, 
inherited and acquired dispositions to act. It is indeed I who 
choose, but my choice is always strictly determined by my con- 
genital nature, modified by the educational and environmental 
habits and influences which make that nature what it concretely 
is now. And my original nature is a perfectly definite datum, 
plastic in a limited degree to the molding influences of the social 
or psychical environment past and present. As life goes on this 
plasticity decreases to the zero point. "You cannot teach an old 
dog new tricks." Hence, the belief, at or before the moment of 
choice, that I could ever choose at will between two alternatives, 
or the after-reflection that I might then have chosen the one which 
I did not embrace, is due to my ignorance of my nature as this 



450 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

displays itself in the succession of my choices. An all-wise psy- 
chologist could predict all our reactions and so-called choices 
through all time, provided that he were likewise an all-wise 
physicist. Our several natures may be unique, in the sense that 
they are specific or individual complexes of psychical factors, 
but what these natures are they inevitably are, and what they 
will be they inevitably will be. The standpoint of psychology, 
as of any other special science, is and should be deterministic, 
but this standpoint is not necessarily final. 

Clearly, then the problem of freedom is the problem of the 
ultimate nature of the self or person, and of its place in the 
scheme of things. We are here simply approaching the central 
problem of our whole treatise from a special angle — that of voli- 
tional and moral consciousness. 

One conception of freedom may be at once eliminated ; namely 
that freedom consists in the power of unmotivated willing, in a 
capricious and mysterious capacity for making choices that have 
no intelligible relation to past choices, habits, and individual char- 
acter. This is the so-called freedom of indifference, liberum ar- 
hitrium indiffer 'entice. According to this view in its extreme form 
the most humane man might suddenly turn round and commit 
the wanton cruelties of a Nero or Caligula, the man with great- 
est power of self-control or with a cold temperament might sud- 
denly become an utter drunkard or debauchee, and this take place 
without any assignable reason. Such a conception of freedom is 
both unintelligible and immoral. If it were true to the facts, edu- 
cation would be worthless, since effective moral habits would be 
impossible of formation and the volitional life of man would be 
a chaos. Without some measure of continuity and predictability 
in human character society would be reduced to anarchy, and 
moral judgment, education and the administration of law would 
be without any firm foundations. This theory contradicts the 
plain facts of experience, and can find refuge only in ignorance 
of human nature. 

Education, moral judgment, and the conduct of the general 
business of society, all presuppose a high degree of stability and 
continuity in human character. Indeed, our social judgments and 
practice, our contracts, credits, promises and plans, all assume 
that human conduct is to a large extent predictable, when we 
know the individual to be a sane and normal self. Whatever sort 



MORAL FREEDOM 451 

of freedom there may be, it must in any case be compatible with 
continuity and stability in character, and with the actual fulfill- 
ment of expectations based on character. 

Furthermore, freedom of choice can be operative only within 
the narrow limits set by one's definite individuality and determi- 
nate circumstances. And freedom of choice is limited by moral 
freedom. A good man who, by repeated choices of the right al- 
ternatives, has formed a strong and steady habit of right decision, 
is morally free. We would hardly say that such a one is a slave 
to virtue, and yet he is practically incapable of making certain 
choices. We should not regard a God who, because of the utter 
goodness of his nature, could not do otherwise than always will 
the right as less free and less perfect than a God who frequently 
willed the worse when he might have willed the better. 

That any human volition ever takes place without adequate 
motives may be dismissed as a senseless assertion. The spectator, 
and even the agent himself, is frequently at a loss to determine 
with any degree of definiteness the grounds of volition, but a 
fuller self-knowledge will always disclose them. That volition is 
determined by the strongest motive is in one sense false and in 
another sense a platitude. 

If by the "strongest motive" be meant a force which pushes 
the self from behind or without, it is a false notion when applied 
to volition. A desire or impulse is not a motive to voluntary ac- 
tion until it has been identified by the self with its own aims and 
interests. Only when the self approves the satisfaction of this 
desire has it become a motive. It is only by the reflective reac- 
tion of the central principle, which weighs values and affirms 
choices, that a vague restlessness or a well-defined impulse becomes 
a motive. When desires conflict, that one which becomes the 
determining motive is the desire which is identified with the self 
as good. Thus, rightly understood, determination by the strong- 
est motive means self-determination, for we have no measure of 
the meaning and strength of motives except in terms of their 
valuation by the self. Motives are not like physical forces which 
may converge from various directions outside their common point 
of application there to constitute automatically a composite re- 
sultant. In voluntary action the resultant, whether simple or 
composite, is constituted finally by the reaction of the entire self. 
Even the subconscious and unconscious tendencies, which influ- 



452 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

ence decision and action so much, have no close analogy to external 
determination by physical forces. The only analogy in the phys- 
ical world to the volitions of a rational self would be that of an 
individuated center of force which maintained itself by self-ad- 
justment and reaction in a variety of ways to its environment, 
and this analogy is a weak one. The physical principle of the 
conservation of energy is irrelevant in this field. A self is a 
synthetic principle of activity which has the power of forming 
new judgments of value. 

The problem of freedom comes, then, to this — is the self in all 
cases an absolutely fixed and temporally predetermined entity or 
not ? Is human individuality the arithmetical sum or chemical 
fusion of various psychical and physiological forces, or is it a 
unique unity capable of self-determining progress and alteration ? 
All the freedom that the moralist needs is that of the self as a 
principle of self-determination and self-development, and not a 
mere moving point of trains of forces converging from behind and 
from without. In short, is there an ultimate spiritual principle 
of synthetic judgment in the empirical ego? If we answer this 
question in the affirmative, then freedom of choice means the 
power, in definite critical and novel situations, to so evaluate and 
determine the sensuous and physiological factors of action that 
one thereby makes these factors the instrumentalities for the ex- 
pression and fulfillment of the higher values of social and per- 
sonal life. If there be an irreducible principle of spiritual indi- 
viduality in the self, then we are free whenever, and in the measure 
in which, this individuality wins expression. This means a limit 
to the analysis and explanation of voluntary action — the limit set 
by the inherent nature of spiritual individuality or personality. 
We may, after the event, say that a heroic moral decision was the 
unavoidable and determinate expression of the individual's nature, 
because, in our ex post facto wisdom, we infer the nature of indi- 
viduality from the acts which are its expressions and, indeed, its 
effectuations. But we cannot, before the event, always determine 
with certainty the limits of voluntary action, of moral choice, of 
heroic decision, of reformation, conversion, or failure. Doubtless 
there must always be specific conditions which arouse or liberate 
hitherto obstructed spiritual energy in the self ; the reality of free- 
dom means simply the power to put more of one's selfhood into 
one's choices and deeds; to value and determine one's motives in 



MORAL FREEDOM 453 

the light of reason, beauty, justice, and love, as these ideals func- 
tion in and through the self-determining personality. 

Man is morally free, if his future is not wholly and exactly 
predetermined by the past expressions of his character, habits, and 
environment. Every critical moral choice must be, in such case, 
a new event in the spiritual world. Character cannot be a fixed 
quantity. It is rather the changing and developing expression or 
actualization, in single deeds and in habitudes of action, of the 
creative principle of individuality or personality. The latter is 
the source and bearer of the actual self's development. A self is 
morally free, if it be sufficiently fluid to be able to break away, 
when stimulated by favorable influences, from old habitudes and 
to form new and better ones by fresh decisions. There must, of 
course, be sufficient reasons for every action. The same self may 
act wrongly in one situation and, afterwards, rightly in a similar 
situation ; because new influences have incited him to a revaluation 
of his standard of action, have altered his sense of relative values, 
and a fresh combination of motives leads to a novel self-affirmation. 
We cannot act contrary to our natures, but, in moral development 
our natures are not rigidly fixed and predetermined quantities, 
changeable only from without. The power of self-initiated and 
self-directed change, of individual and unique reaction, is the very 
root of freedom. It may be, of course, that we cannot predict 
every human valuation, choice, and volition, simply because of the 
vast complexity of the internal and external components of cona- 
tion and the contrasting limitations of our knowledge. On the 
other hand, if freedom means anything positive, we could never, 
even with the most complete knowledge possible to a spectator, 
predict every choice of another self; for the self contains a 
uniquely ultimate principle of choice or self-determination, which 
is known to another, and even to itself clearly and fully, only as it 
reveals itself in new and critical situations. In short, to admit 
freedom in the sense of self-determination is to accept the ultimate 
reality of a creative principle of individuality as a not further 
explicable fact or constituent element in the universe. 

On the other hand, it may be admitted that, when a volition is 
viewed retrospectively, the antecedent conditions being given to- 
gether with the individual character, the individual could not then 
have willed otherwise. For, in explaining past choices and actions, 
we are not now viewing the volitions in their immediate reality, 



454 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

and we could not so view them without ourselves being identical 
with the agent at the moment of choice. When we are in the midst 
of choosing, our volitions cannot be said to be wholly predeter- 
mined, since they are still in process, not accomplished facts. 
Volitions are not determinate until they have been determined. 
The explanation of a choice, a valuation, a voluntary deed, is 
always a retrospective procedure which fails to do justice to the 
act in its immediate and living actuality as a novel or creative 
event in the spiritual order. 

Thus, two stages of freedom may be distinguished — abstract or 
primary freedom and concrete or realized freedom. By abstract 
freedom I mean the possibility of reflective valuation and choice, 
and of the development thereby of a well-organized individual 
character. This takes place through the functioning of the prin- 
ciple of rational individuality within the limits set by the con- 
genital equipment of instincts, impulses, and other native capaci- 
ties, and within the limits of a specific physical and social environ- 
ment. Concrete freedom is the attainment of a more stable, 
organized and harmonious individuality through the exercise of 
freedom in the primary sense of freedom of choice or self-deter- 
mination. To be free in the latter sense is to be a unique center 
of spiritual individuality. To become free in the full sense is 
to achieve the organization of the congenital tendencies or im- 
pulses, instincts, and desires by the spiritual principle. Full free- 
dom is complete self-determination through the service of the 
intrinsic values of truth, justice, beauty, and love, in the individ- 
ualized and concrete forms in which these values alone can be 
actual with reference to the unique nature and specific situation 
of each self. 

Self-determination is a matter of degree. It is proportionate 
to the harmonious organization of the self. The more personality 
the more freedom. The self which is most capricious and uncer- 
tain in its choices and conations is most unfree, has the least degree 
of personality. For personality is the harmonious integration of 
a self's impulsions to feel and to think and, by consequence, to act. 
Since this integration rarely attains completeness, there are many 
degrees of freedom. The capacity for further integration is all 
the freedom from the chains of the past that is possible or desirable 
for a moral agent. 

The facts of moral or spiritual new birth through some great 



MORAL FREEDOM 455 

crisis, as well as of moral disintegration, cannot be gainsaid. In 
no case does the seeming suddenness of the critical change imply 
that the change has not been the resultant of psychical causes, 
slowly incubating in the self. A man may come to himself sud- 
denly, and think it was a miraculous event, an act of divine grace.. 
I do not question his right, in view of the tremendous significance 
of the change, to call it such. But changes of this character must 
always be the results of the gathering into one focus, and the 
spiritual synthesis, of forces that have long been maturing. The 
gates of the future are not locked and barred eternally. There 
are new creative syntheses in the volitional life, as in other phases 
of reality. But spiritual regeneration, as well as degeneration, 
has always its causal conditions. 

The wars in our members, the inharmonious partial selves that 
inhabit our bodies, are conflicting phases of a mind or soul that is 
not at unity with itself and therefore not at unity with the uni- 
verse. The slave of habit is one in whom have been formed 
habitual dispositions of desiring and striving that are in conflict 
with the gleams of a richer and more harmonious personality 
which he now and then entertains. One may be even a slave of 
good habits, by becoming a creature of routine and convention, to 
the extent that he loses the capacity for spiritual growth. True 
freedom is rational self-realization and self-direction, since reason 
is the generalizing, organizing, evaluating, end-determining and 
means-finding instrument, by which the native impulsions and 
desires are organized into the master sentiments, which are, in 
their indiscerptible interpenetration, the personality as a feeling 
and willing being. The popular notion that there is an incom- 
patibility between reason and sentiment, as guides to conduct, is 
erroneous. Pure reason, if there be such a thing, never moved or 
restrained anybody. Crude instinct and emotion unregulated 
never developed into a coherent self. It is through the refinement 
or sublimation, and the organization, of the connate feeling-life in 
the light of reflection that stability, harmony and ordered growth 
become qualities of the self; and thus the self becomes a person. 

Kant defined free action as action done wholly in obedience to 
the law of practical reason, out of reverence for the moral law. 
Kant was right in contending that free action is rational action 
which takes account of the specific impulses and situation of the 
self in the light of a moral universe or system of persons (his 



456 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

kingdom of ends). He was wrong in failing to recognize fully 
that the dynamic materials of all action, and as well the specific 
sources of all judgments of value, are the connate impulses and 
interests of the self, as these are modified by the social soil and 
atmosphere. The moral person is always a concrete organization 
of human interests, and this organization is always effected in a 
social medium. 

Bergson, in his fascinating book, Time and Free Will, argues, 
somewhat as I have argued, that personal life is a creative process 
in which the deeds of the past are not, in the present moment, the 
sole condition of the future. Man, says Bergson, lives upon shal- 
lower planes of routine most of his time ; but, occasionally, and in 
critical moments, his deeper self wells up and overflows and alters 
the direction of the routine plane of life ; then is man most free ; 
then are his acts least predictable, since each free act is a creative 
moment in the history of a personality. Thus the living moment 
of willing, in which the self puts into its choice the greatest full- 
ness of its psychical being, is a new increment in the growth of 
personality. I grant that man is most free when his deeper and 
more enduring sentiments or permanent dispositions to feel and 
think are most fully expressed, and that in such moments the self 
ascends to new heights of personality, wins to higher grades of 
self-realization. I grant too, that no one, perhaps not even an 
omniscient being, could fully foresee the outcome of such creative 
moments. An omniscient being must know all there is to know, 
but he cannot know as fact what is not yet fact. If the develop- 
ment of personality, and indeed the development of subpersonal 
life, be not wholly illusory, then we live in a growing universe. 
But I do not think that pure indeterminism follows. The capaci- 
ties of selfhood that are being, and that are to be, realized by the 
freest volitions are, nevertheless, specific dynamic qualities; not 
indeterminate possibilities but determinate possibilities of creative 
resultants. The freest act is just the act in which the deepest 
nature, or dunamis, of selfhood comes to fruition. If it be, in 
serving one's friends, one's country or one's fellows, in devotion to 
truth and justice, in the discovery or creation of beauty and 
knowledge, in the life of love and loyalty, that man is most free, 
as I believe, it is just because in such attitudes and acts man's 
deepest and most abiding nature wins expression. There is no 
indeterminism, no uncaused conation; but there are various planes 



MORAL FREEDOM 457 

of action, superficial and deeper, conventional and personal, ani- 
mal and spiritual. Each type of being is most free when it acts 
most in accordance with its true nature ; man, therefore, when he 
acts most in accordance with his nature as affectional, social, 
rational and creatively imaginative. In brief, man is most unfree 
when he is content to live by bread alone, if indeed he be ever thus 
content ; most free when he lives most fully as a spirit or person in 
and for and through the cosmos of persons. 

Every act of genuine freedom means a novel and unique event 
in the history of the universe. If there be freedom, then ulti- 
mate reality must include change. In the exercise and achieve- 
ment of freedom man affirms the absolute or ultimate in himself. 
He transcends the world of passive fact and becomes a creative 
center of spiritual life. In so far, then, as man is free, the 
supreme spirit or ultimate ground of reality seems to be limited 
or finite. But this limitation need not constitute an external 
limitation on the will of the supreme spirit. The true end of 
action for every human self is harmony with the ultimate society 
of selves. This harmony is attained only through devotion to those 
ideal values which reflect, and are rooted in the nature of, the 
supreme unity. The ultimate spiritual unity must thus make 
possible the harmony of finite selves; hence the freedom of the 
latter may have its ground in an apparent self-limitation of the 
supreme self, which is really the self-expression of the latter' s con- 
crete individuality. The absoluteness which would be saved to a 
supreme self by the denial of human self-initiative would be the 
state of an oriental despot without character, friends, or com- 
panions. One could not define such a being as spirit at all. An 
ultimate spirit or person can be such only in relation to a com- 
munity or society of selves, in whose lives and destinies and deeds 
his own life and purpose are fulfilled. 



CHAPTEK XXXIV 



IMMORTALITY 



The possibility of the continued existence of the self after 
bodily dissolution clearly depends on the nonidentity of the con- 
scious or "spiritual" individual with the body. Apart from the 
supposed evidence afforded by communications from departed 
spirits, the grounds for a credible hope of immortality must be, in 
the very nature of the case, indirect. It is a question of empirical 
possibility, reinforced by rational probability. 

The monistic or identity theory, which regards the mental and 
physical series as the two parallel manifestations of one substance, 
whose nature is not known to us, is incompatible with personal 
immortality. For, whether parallelism be taken in the more 
restricted sense of psychoneural, or the more general sense of com- 
plete psychophysical, parallelism; in either case it follows that, 
when the physiological complex which we call the human body is 
disintegrated and dissipated into its chemical constituents, the 
psychical self must likewise suffer disintegration into correspond- 
ing psychical elements. I have argued that the parallelistic 
hypothesis, with its consequent doctrine of a neutral substance as 
the underlying identity of mind and body, is not the final truth 
in this matter. The self, as an active synthetizing principle, is 
an immaterial, rational, or spiritual individual, which is so inti- 
mately associated with the body as to form with it a complex 
individual whole. The mental self is partially dependent on the 
body and perhaps partially independent of it. 

From this standpoint individual immortality is possible. Fur- 
thermore, the whole world process has probably been making, and 
is now making, for the development and self -fulfillment of person- 
alities. The ultimate meaning, so far as we human beings can 
determine, of the drift of natural and historical evolution seems 
to be the production and perfection of reflective and self-active 

458 



IMMORTALITY 459 

individuals. Hence, unless the process of reality, taken in its 
totality, to be a discontinuous and incoherent jumble, an incon- 
sistent and self-contradictory world, the most rational postulate 
in regard to the future is that selves may persist and attain to 
higher levels of development under other conditions than the pres- 
ent affords. All the meanings and intrinsic values of experience, 
all the truly significant interests and worthful features of the 
world process, are concentered in the lives of selves. We cannot 
understand what truth or harmonious experience, what self- 
coherent reality, what justice and love, what beauty and perfection, 
could be or mean apart from the deeds and lives of selves. 

If there be continuity, conservation, and enhancement of the 
intrinsic values of actual experience, then personalities must be, in 
some manner, permanent elements of reality. If the values of con- 
scious existence, from the most exact and universal truth to the 
most concretely individualized love or interpersonal harmony, be 
mere will-o'-the-wisps, delusive phantoms mysteriously and epi- 
sodically engendered by the ever shifting complications of the brute 
insensate elements of things, there is no ultimate meaning and no 
reasonableness in the cosmical process. The philosopher who pro- 
poses this alternative to the conservation of values would be, with 
his theories, the momentary and meaningless offshoot of an in- 
sensate and nonmoral world. 

The perduration of the spiritual principle of personality is, 
then, a rational postulate for the interpretation of this temporal 
and developing world. But, when we attempt to determine more 
specifically what immortality may mean we encounter grave, and, 
perhaps, insurmountable difficulties. The ordinary man's belief 
in personal immortality involves, doubtless, the assumption of the 
continued conscious identity of the concrete selfhood in the future 
with that selfhood in the past ; in other words, the persistent func- 
tioning of memories. The minimal meaning of personal immor- 
tality seems to be the continuance and further development of the 
individual life through the conservation and increasing fulfillment 
of moral and intellectual achievement and of affectional experi- 
ences of love and beauty. Unless a self be, in the future, contin- 
uous in its power to feel and to know, to serve and enjoy truth, 
goodness, beauty and love, in and with the community of other per- 
sonal spirits — continuous in the exercise of the powers which it 
has used and enjoyed, however imperfectly, in its present existence 



460 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

— that self will have ceased to be. If its powers have been warped 
and thwarted here, continued existence would imply the liberation 
in the future of the imprisoned powers. 

Now, clearly, our memories are the empirical basis of our 
feelings of personal continuity, although memory in turn, as I 
have previously shown, depends on the functioning of the syn- 
thetic principle of selfhood. And memories depend, to a very 
great extent at least, on sensory experiences. Even our memories 
of the most intimate and sacred feelings of love, friendship, 
spiritual achievement, joy and peace, depend in part on sensory 
experiences. We cannot recall the persons of our dearest friends 
without some recourse to sensory images. Sensory experiences are 
all somehow registered in the central nervous system as functional 
modifications. When the body, and therewith the nervous system, 
have finally disintegrated, does not this whole function of memory, 
the empirical basis of personality, disappear ? 

Perhaps! But, on the other hand, there is no proof that the 
distilled essence of our physiologically conditioned experiences and 
deeds here and now may not be taken up into, and form perduring 
functional constituents in, the nonphysical self. No sensory 
process, through whatever bodily organ it may come, is a con- 
stituent in the life of the actual personality, until it has been 
assimilated by synthetic activity into the organization of the con- 
scious selfhood. Our perceptual imagery, dependent on eye, ear, 
or skin, and on the functioning of the cortical areas, first gets its 
meanings and values through the active mental processes of as- 
similation, selection, and interpretation. The precondition of all 
relevant and useful remembering is the original apprehension of 
meanings. In contrast with the mere routine repetition of blind 
associative memory, based on mere contiguity, relevant or logical 
memory, which reproduces past experiences that have significant 
relations to present ideas, emotions, and purposes, is based on the 
original apprehension of significant relationships in the parts of 
experience to one another and to the self. 

Cases of sensory aphasia, for example, so-called psychical 
hlindness and deafness, wherein the eye and ear with their appro- 
priate nerves are intact and the cortical areas of vision and hearing 
probably defective, exist without loss of reason or of the sense of 
personal identity. Such cases lend support to the hypothesis that 
the synthetic meaning-finding principle in the self is independent 



IMMORTALITY 461 

at least of the functioning of some cortical areas. 1 Such patho- 
logical cases do not establish the complete independence of the 
brain on the part of the synthetic principle. They do support the 
validity of the distinction between the principle of significant per- 
sonal memory and self-identity, and the neurally conditioned func- 
tions of perceptual imagery. The synthetic principle seems able 
to function when the sense organs and the cortical areas connected 
with them are impaired; in other words when the neural connec- 
tions between the sense-organs are broken or deranged. On the 
other hand, the sense of personal identity seems to suffer aberra- 
tion through neural derangements. It may be that these abnor- 
malities of multiple personality and insanity are the results of 
derangements in the coordinating mechanisms which connect the 
sensory and motor arrangements for the expression of personality. 
The synthetic principle then would be the immaterial link or 
unifier of sensory experiences and motor activities. One of its 
chief functions would be to make and break connections by a 
selective emphasis of various materials of sense experience. From 
this standpoint the immaterial self is both furthered and hindered 
in its activities by the bodily mechanism ; which is its instrument 
of expression in the present world ; but a faulty instrument which, 
when seriously deranged, impedes or altogether prevents the ex- 
pression of the mental self. No facts in the physiological and 
pathological orders negative the possibility that the mental self, 
which is able, by its selective synthetizing power, to organize and 
interpret the sensory materials of experience, may also be able, 
independently of its present body, to conserve the quintessence of 
meanings, values, and powers, which it has distilled from its 
material environment in the alembic of its own unique self-activity. 

The possibility of personal immortality is open as an object of 
rational faith. If no proffered proof therefor is adequate, no 
positive disproof is forthcoming. 

I cannot regard the so-called communications from departed 
persons to the living as having convincing value. The evidence for 
these things seems to me thus far insufficient. If sufficient, it 



Compare the very ingenious use made by Bergson of such cases in his 
Matter and Memory, Chap. 2. Also Henry Head, ' ' Aphasia and Kindred Dis- 
orders of Speech," Brain, Vol. 43, pt. 2, pp. 87-165. Also Dr. Head on 
"Disorders of Symbolic Thinking and Expression," British Journal of 
Psychology, General Section, Vol. xi, pt. 2 (1921), pp. 179-193. 



462 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

would not prove immortality but only continued existence, con- 
cerning the value of which I should be, in view of the character 
of the communications, very doubtful. 

On the other hand, I cannot share the attitude of those 
scientists and philosophers who would ignore or pooh-pooh the 
investigation of the so-called spiritistic phenomena. I grant that 
discouragingly little has thus far been established by such investi- 
gations. I grant too, that the messages which have come through 
from discarnate spirits, if indeed any veridical tidings have come 
through, are, for the most part, of so trivial and commonplace a 
character as to shed but little, and that little not a very cheerful, 
light on the conditions of existence of discarnate spirits. Never- 
theless, if only a few cases of communications were established, 
for which no other reasonable explanation could be found than 
that they came from discarnate spirits, the hope of immortality 
would thereby have received a support more powerful than all the 
speculations and reasonings of philosophers. For, the greatest 
obstacle to faith in personal immortality is the apparent fact that 
the functioning of the individual mind (and we must not forget 
that every real mind is an individual mind), is dependent on the 
functioning of a nervous system. Strong evidence that a mental 
self, which had once been associated with a nervous system, con- 
tinues to exist without that nervous system would be strong pre- 
sumptive evidence of personal immortality. The objection that 
evidence of the continued existence of persons whom one knew in 
their earthly lifetimes would not prove the eternal existence of any 
self seems to me a quibble. Tor, if a self can survive the disin- 
tegration of an earthly nervous system, that is strong presumptive 
grounds for concluding that that self will endure so long as it is 
worthy to endure. And who will undertake to say what constitutes 
worthiness to endure ? While, then, I am not yet convinced that 
the continued existence of discarnate persons has been established 
by psychical research, I regard this field as an important area of 
investigation. I have not personally engaged upon it, because 
my occupation and, in part, my tastes, have not led me to do so. 
But it seems to me that scientists and philosophers who neither 
engage in it themselves nor admit that it is a legitimate field for 
investigation are guilty of an unwarrantable dogmatism and are 
the creatures of intellectual prejudices. On the other hand the 
pursuit of such inquiries requires such a very unusual combination 



IMMORTALITY 463 

of critical dispassionateness, mental alertness, power of weighing 
evidence, expert knowledge of physics, physiology and psychology, 
that I think it is a field into which but few should venture. 

I return to general philosophical considerations. The creative 
synthetic principle of selfhood must persist. The concrete per- 
sonality, that is organized around and by this principle, may per- 
sist. But how % When the avenues of sense and motor expression 
are forever closed and the brain has ceased to function, how and 
with what heritage from its physiologically conditioned life on 
earth does the spiritual individual take its flight ? Eo one who 
has gazed on the dead body of a loved one can doubt that the 
mysterious principle which conferred meaning, worth, and beauty 
on that tenement of clay has vanished. It is unreasonable that it 
shall have vanished into utter nothingness. What then has it taken 
with it, from the epoch of its career which is now closed ? Clear 
traces of its earthly experiences and deeds, absorbed into or fused 
with the conscious unity of the self so as to preserve the sense of 
moral and spiritual continuity with that past life ? Or a more 
highly integrated and more harmoniously organized individuality 
bearing, without continuity of personal memory, the fruitage of 
its earthly activities ? I have no new light to shed on this momen- 
tous question. I hold, however, that one is justified in believing in 
the continuity of personal spirit, as a real possibility. 

A self may inhabit, after death, a finer, more ethereal body. 
I may add, merely as a personal statement, that I am unable to 
form any image or clear concept of the nature and conditions of 
existence of a purely disembodied spirit. 

The persistence and continued functioning of the spiritual core 
of selfhood is a matter of rationally justifiable faith. The degree 
and character of continued personal identity must remain, from 
the standpoint of philosophy, a matter of conjecture. 

Faith in the conservation and enhancement of spiritual values 
is a rational faith. Indeed, it is the basis of faith in the reason- 
ableness and goodness of the cosmical order itself. If the spiritual 
values of human existence at its highest term of development and 
achievement do not endure, amidst all the changes and chances of 
this mortal universe, there seems to be no stable or coherent mean- 
ing in existence. Then the universe is irrational — indeed it is no 
universe at all. 

Faith in the continuance and enhancement of the intrinsic 



464 MAN AND THE COSMOS] 

values — faith in truth, in beauty, in friendship, in love and har- 
mony of life — in short, faith in reason and the worth of spiritual 
life — such faith is only another name for faith in the persistence 
of spiritual individuality. For, I repeat, these values are real only 
as functions of personal experience and deed. To have faith in the 
permanence of intrinsic values is to assume the enduring reality of 
selves who know truth, feel beauty, who love and win spiritual 
harmony. 

On the other hand, this is eternal life here and now — to know 
and to live for and in the higher values of the spirit. It is to 
empty life of all meaning to suppose that the only value which the 
present existence can have is that of a mere preparation for some 
future and different state of existence. True immortality does 
not consist in a mere continued existence in time, in which the 
attainment of genuinely satisfying and lasting values is postponed 
to some other and future stage of life. If we take the terms "God" 
and "Christ" in a sufficiently inclusive humanistic sense to embrace 
the supremacy of all spiritual (that is, of intellectual, aesthetic, 
moral and other interpersonal) values, we may say — "This is 
eternal life, to know God and Jesus Christ whom he hath sent." 
If this seem to any reader to be unduly stretching the meaning of 
historic terms, he can substitute other terms more to his liking. I 
think my meaning is plain. 



BOOK V 
THE ORDER OF THE UNIVERSE-COSMOLOGY 



CHAPTER XXXV 



UNIVERSAL ORDER 



We have now considered the nature and implications of knowl- 
edge in general, the general structure of the universe, and the 
nature and implications of personality and values. It remains to 
gather up our conclusions into a comprehensive conception of the 
structure and implications of our world of experience taken as a 
whole. 

We have seen that the order of the universe must include a 
succession of levels of subordinate orders. Reality exhibits a 
hierarchy of grades of organization or integration. I shall now 
briefly resume the principal steps in the universal order. These 
are — (I) the spatial and temporal order; (II) the noetic order; 
and (III) the axiological order or order of values. 

I. The Spatial and Temporal Order 

Thought of crosswise as existing in a temporal instant nature 
is conceived as one continuous whole. (Bear in mind that timeless 
instants do not exist ; the notion is a limiting conception or abstrac- 
tion.) Nature consists of macroscopic spatial configurations. 
But, whether we look at nature macroscopically or microscopically, 
its configurations are relative to one another. To use Hegelian 
language: "Each one is an other of others." However one may 
elect to think of the ultimate elements of nature, whether as atoms, 
electrons or other punctiform centers of energy, any single element 
must be conceived of as the center of an indefinitely vast network 
of relationships. The character of a spatial element is defined by 
its position and its position determines and is determined by its 
relations. It is the ultimate aim of physical science to describe the 
qualitied events, which are any empirical chunk of nature, in terms 
of the positional alterations of elements. Physical science pre- 
supposes that at any instant nature is a continuous spatial whole 

467 



468 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

of simultaneous events. Simultaneous microscopic events are just 
momentary positions in space. The electrons which make up an 
atom of hydrogen or helium are a system of momental positions. 
Space means essentially the order of relationships between simul- 
taneously existing positions. A spatial system, macroscopic or, 
microscopic, is an order of elements existing simultaneously. But 
there are no timeless instants. It is just as true of an atom or 
electron as it is of a human being that it continueth not in one 
stay. A spatial configuration is a moving configuration, and since 
the natures of its elemental particles depend on their positions and 
these are changing, geometrical descriptions of nature in terms of 
pure spatial relations are fictitious accounts of fictitious char- 
acters. An atom or electron is like Zeno's arrow in that it' 
is always moving in the place where it is not. Nature is ex- 
tended. It has spatial quality but does not occupy space, for 
space exists only in the form of abstraction from the dynamic 
content of reality. Bergson is right in holding that reality is 
duration and that to conceive it as a purely spatial mechanism is 
to arrest its actual flow and distort the moving, changing, grow- 
ing life of nature into unreal abstractions. As Doctor Whitehead 
finely says — "The passage of nature, which is only another 
name for the creative force of existence, has no narrow ledge of 
definite instantaneous present within which to operate. Its 
operative presence, which is now urging nature forward must be 
sought for through the whole, in the remotest past as well as in 
the narrowest breadth of any present duration. Perhaps also in 
the unrealized future. Perhaps also in the future which might be 
as well as in the actual future which will be. It is impossible to 
meditate on time and the mystery of the creative passage of nature 
without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human 
intelligence. " x 

Indeed the notion of a point or position in space implies a 
relation between this point and at least one other point, and 
spatial sense or direction which implies time. And all attempts 
to conceive a totality of space involve time, since the synthesis by 
which one thinks together finite spaces, say the interstellar spaces, 
as parts of one whole, implies time. A space world is a continu- 
ous whole and the notion of continuity involves time. The notion 

1 The Concept of Nature, p. 73. 



UNIVERSAL ORDER 469 

of boundless space implies that of endless time. Thus the notion 
of a boundless space is a pictorial symbol for the mind's conscious- 
ness of its own capacity to repeat indefinitely a well-defined act 
of thought. A boundless space means that one can think on indef- 
initely imagining one space configuration to be contained in a 
larger configuration. A space-whole actually infinite could be con- 
ceived to exist only in an endless duration; therefore an actually 
infinite space could never exist at any moment of time. The 
ordinary notion of infinite space is that of a vague penumbra which 
is thought of as the fringe of our definite perceptions and concep- 
tions of spatial order. 

Duration or time, the dynamic aspect of nature, is thus more 
fundamental to the structure of reality than space, the static 
aspect. As S. Alexander puts it, time is the soul of space and space 
is the body of time. Since our conception of reality is dynamical, 
for us the soul of anything is its reality of which its body is the 
expression. Any bit of space is the trail of action and suffering 
on the part of dynamic monads. Space persists because centers of 
action and suffering persist, and therefore the relations between 
them continue or are repeated. A permanent spatial configuration 
is consentaneous with the persistence of a set of dynamical rela- 
tions. An actual space, perceived or imagined, is a perspective 
or point of view, taken by a percipient, of actual and possible 
dynamical transactions between itself and other contemporane- 
ously existing reals. Positions or situations involve temporal 
simultaneity. A distinction between two positions implies the 
duration of the movement of a point from one position to the 
other. We become habituated to thinking of the actual or imagined 
space complex which we can envisage as not involving time. I 
do not, for instance, think of time as being involved in the space- 
whole that I take in as I look out of my study window. But, if I 
am asked how far it is to yonder tree, I can answer the question 
only by estimating the number of successive movements of a yard- 
stick or of pacing out the distance. Moreover, the very notion of 
distance and of direction in space implies the duration of the 
objects, thus spatially related, through finite times. In short, any 
set of entities spatially related is a set of entities persisting, that 
is, having a duration in time. 

It is misleading to speak of time as a fourth dimension of 
space. Time is not a dimension. It is becoming. It is change, the 



470 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

passage of events. As Doctor Whitehead puts it : "There can be 
no time apart from space ; and no space apart from time ; and no 
space and time apart from the passage of the events of nature. 
The isolation of an entity in thought, when we think of it as a bare 
'it/ has no counterpart in any corresponding isolation in nature. 
Such isolation is merely part of the procedure of intellectual 
knowledge." 2 Thus the idea that nature is merely an aggregate 
of independent entities each capable of isolation is false. 3 A time- 
less space is an intellectual abstraction just as a "point" or "in- 
stant" is. Space and time spring from a common root. The 
ultimate fact of experience is a space-time fact. 4 We are aware of 
nature enduring . . . Thus awareness of nature begins in aware- 
ness of a whole which is present because this present whole of nature 
is "duration." A duration is a "temporal slab of nature." 
Nature at a moment exhibits, among other things, the relation of 
a three-dimensional space ; this is instantaneous space. The instan- 
taneous points of such a space are routes of approximation con- 
structed on the same general principle as moments; namely, a 
point series is an infinite series of events, every event extended 
over all the events subsequent to it in the series ; the whole series 
converges towards an ideal of an event of nonextension. An 
instantaneous point is better named an "event particle." Event 
particles form a four-dimensional manifold which is divided into 
Jthree-dimensional instantaneous spaces which lie within the several 
moments. We should speak more accurately in the plural, namely 
of "times and spaces" and not of time and space. 5 Durations, or 
events, which constitute the passage of nature, says Doctor White- 
head, extend over one another. For example — "a volume may 
be defined as the locus of the event particles in which a moment 
intersects an event, provided that the two do intersect." 6 "An 
event will be said to occupy the aggregate of event particles which 
lie within it." 7 "But there are alternative time systems, and each 



2 Op. cit., p. 142. 

3 Op. cit., p. 141. 

4 Op. cit., p. 132. 

5 See A. N. Whitehead in Symposium, "Time, Space, and Material/ ' 
Problems of Science and Philosophy, Publications of Aristotelean Society, 1919, 
pp. 44-57; and Mr. Whitehead's An Inquiry into the Principles of Natural 
Knowledge, and The Concept of Nature, passim. 

6 The Concept of Nature, p. 101. 
'Ibid., p. 101. 



UNIVERSAL ORDER 471 

time system has its own peculiar system of grouped points." 8 A 
point is an absolute position in the timeless space of a given time 
system. An object, as Doctor Whitehead conceives it, is a factor 
in nature which is without passage. We are not directly aware of 
objects but we are aware of sameness or repetition of quality in 
events. No two events are exactly alike but they may have simi- 
larities. "An object is an ingredient in the character of some 
event. In fact the character of an event is nothing but the objects 
which are ingredient in it and the ways in which those objects 
make their ingression into the event. Thus the theory of objects is 
the theory of the comparison of events. Events are only com- 
parable because they body forth only permanences . . . Objects 
are the elements in nature which can be again." 9 But since events 
are percipient events or moments of awareness, as Doctor White- 
head calls them, and since no two of these can be alike and they are 
all transitory durations in nature as the object of sense awareness, 
there can be no permanence. Objects or permanences are con- 
structed through the recognition of sameness or repetition in the 
quality of events. In the case of perceptual objects, such as a 
coat with shape, texture and color, Doctor Whitehead says that the 
percipient event is the situation of a variety of sense objects due 
in this case to the interplay of sense objects of touch and sense 
objects of sight. But a sense object brown or woolly is nothing by 
itself. It is an abstraction from the perceptual object and the rela- 
tive permanences and interdependences, the orderly persistences, 
comings and goings of perceptual objects imply that nature is some- 
thing more than passage. It is orderly passage. Thus percipient 
events, as awareness, and their objects involve a permanent or sub- 
stantial order, an ultimate space-time order of which our awareness 
of passing events and of the particular objects through the passage 
of events are finite perspectives. 

Doctor Whitehead states that the continuity of nature in its 
passage is due to the fact that durations overlap or extend over one 
another and that there are no timeless instants. It follows that 
there are in reality no absolute maximal or minimal durations. 
The overlapping of finite durations, which is the empirical basis 
for the belief in the continuity of nature, implies the permanence 



*lbid., p. 106. 

8 Ibid., pp. 143, 144. 



472 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

of an order to which all finite durations are subject. And since 
this order is the order of all durations it must be the timeless order 
of temporal events. In brief, unless nature, in the sense of the 
space-time world, be a mere collective name for an absolutely dis- 
crete and chaotic succession of finite events or durations, it is the 
manifestation of a permanent or supertemporal order, an invariant 
principle. 

Indeed an invariant principle or supertemporal order is im- 
plied in all our human standards of time measurement. If we 
recognize, as we do, the relativity of our actual standards to some 
more nearly invariant standard, this very recognition is a route of 
approximation to an implied absolute invariant. We correct our 
sensuous estimates of time by the watch, the watch by the astro- 
nomical clock, the astronomical clock by large scale sidereal move- 
ments which are the closest approximation we can make to an invari- 
ant rhythm. And when the astronomer, for example, makes allow- 
ance for the slowing up of the velocity of the earth's rotation he is 
seeking the closest possible approximation to an invariant order — 
to a perfect cosmical rhythm. 

Nature is the all-inclusive space-time world. There is no non- 
temporal space world or nonspatial temporal world. Space is the 
order of interaction among contemporaneously enduring monads. 
Space means the permanence or perduration of interacting centers. 
Space means that the perduring centers of relationship are a sys- 
tem. It implies the unity and continuity of a supertemporal 
ground of interaction — a world ground. There can be no inter- 
actions without a ground and there can be no permanence or order 
unless the ground of interaction be supertemporal. As Lotze 
argued : If two elements, A and B, are related in any way, then 
either the relation is both relevant to A and B and they are ele- 
ments in one system or the relation R is wholly irrelevant to the 
being of both A and B and their mutual influence ; then we have 
A, B, and R, as atomic entities, but no real A-R-B. The relation 
does not really relate. Either the terms, supposed to be related, 
fall wholly apart, or we must seek other relations R ± and R 2 to 
relate R to A and B, respectively, and still further relations to con- 
nect A-R x -R and R-R 2 -B and so on, indefinitely; or we must 
assume a common ground or medium of the interaction of the 
simplest elements in the system of reality. We can never get A 
and B related in any fashion unless we presuppose the one ground 



UNIVERSAL ORDER 473 

or medium. Thus, all the relations and entities related can so 
exist as parts of the one real being. This argument of Lotze's, the 
principle of which is involved in all singularisms from Parmenides 
to Spinoza and Bradley, if taken in this form, involves pantheism. 
Everything finite is a part of the one. 

But may not, as James Ward puts it, the interaction between 
finite entities be in the nature of immediate rapport? May not 
reality be a pluralistically conceived collection of interactive and 
interpatient beings, each one acting directly on others? It may 
possibly, but in this case there would be no intelligible basis for 
the orderly or determinate modes of continuous interaction between 
the plural reals. Leibniz' monads act in harmony, because there 
is a principle or ground of order which so determines them to act. 
Whatever be the degree of order or systematic continuity in the 
transactions of finite entities, to that same degree there must be a 
cosmic principle of order. In so far as there may be contingency 
or chance in the course of things, to that same degree there is, of 
course, a limit to the principle of order. 

Instead of saying that there must be one medium of interaction 
between the plural reals, which seems to me a misleading spatial 
metaphor that logically involves one in a geometrical and fatalistic 
pantheism, a "block universe" type of doctrine, I would hold that 
the interrelation of the monads or indi vidua (the finite entities) 
has its final ground in a cosmic principle of order, which, in its 
own being, transcends these transactions between finite reals. The 
cosmic ground of order is thus, not the medium of interaction, but 
the source of the properties or laws of behavior by virtue of which 
finite individua interact It is, I shall try to show more fully in 
the sequel, an over-self, a transcendent spiritual unity, or super- 
personal community (the latter is my understanding of the doc- 
trine of the Trinity) . The notion of an over-self or superpersonal 
community of life is more than simply the most adequate ground 
for the personal and spiritual life of man. Jt is, logically and 
psychologically, the most adequate conceptual basis to account for 
the unity and continuity of the universe in its physical and vital 
aspects. 

Not an all-inclusive or all-containing being, but one perduring 
originating and sustaining ground of order, is for me, the ultimate 
reality. In the remainder of this chapter I shall try to develop 
and illustrate this conception. 



474 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

The conception of the ether of space among physicists illus- 
trates the inescapable necessity of thought to conceive a ground 
of interaction. However the electrons may be conceived, the im- 
possibility of thinking that forces act across absolutely empty 
space, which is nonbeing, or that the ultimate ground of our 
physical world can be an indefinite multitude of absolutely discrete 
centers of force, leads inevitably to the hypothesis that macroscopic 
matter has its common ground in the relations of microscopic 
specks or centers of activity or inertia which are in motion in the 
ether. The ether is a perfect fluid through which these microscopic 
specks stream without meeting any perceptible resistance. To say 
that ether is a perfect fluid is only another way of saying that there 
must be a continuous medium or ground of interaction among the 
discrete force centers. The extreme tenuity and elasticity of the 
ether are the physicist's way of expressing the need for a unitary 
conserving principle as the ground of the order of interaction among 
atoms and electrons. Thus, the ether is a symbolic concept, which 
means that the ultimate ground of all physical activities must be 
the conserving self-activity of the supreme cosmical force. As I 
understand it, in the Einstein theory of relativity the ether is dis- 
pensed with. But if the electron theory or any other theory of 
the granular structure of the physical world wins out, it will be 
necessary to postulate in some other form an ultimate ground of 
order and continuity. 

Nature is a system of interactive and interpatient elements. 
Each of these elements is a space-time reality; it is spatial as 
being a member of the contemporaneous system of nature, and it is 
temporal as enduring; it is dynamical inasmuch as it acts and 
suffers. The whole continuous system implies a self-conserving 
active ground of order. The universe of nature has the crosswise 
or simultaneous order of a system of contemporaneously related 
elements and the lengthwise order of a continuous or enduring 
process. The lengthwise aspect of order is not, as we have seen in 
a previous chapter, that of complete qualitative identity in the 
successive events which constitute the history of nature. The order 
of nature is a creative advance. Nevertheless it is an order and 
therefore there must be a supertemporal ground of the history of 
nature. This ground must be an everenduring principle of 
creative self-activity. 

Since all our notions of continuous self-activity are derived 



UNIVERSAL ORDER 475 

from our immediate experiences thereof in our own impulsive and 
purposive efforts, and since the more organized continuity there 
is in a center of activity, the more does that center approach to 
the type of a personal self, are we not warranted in saying that the 
ultimate sustaining active ground of order, of organization and 
continuity, for the universe is best conceived after the analogy of 
a self? 

II. The Ultimate Noetic Oedee 

We have already argued at length, in chapters III to VIII, that 
all striving towards fuller truth is guided by the ideal of systematic 
wholeness, self-coherence, or organization. We do not possess a 
completely harmonious system of truth, and perhaps we never 
shall. Our human truths are not falsified by their partial or 
fragmentary character, by the fact that we do not know the whole 
truth in its harmonious completeness. That, in a general sense, we 
can know the whole in outline follows from the fact that there is 
an ideal or standard of self-coherence or harmony in a system, by 
which we measure our partial truths in their reference to one 
another. Thus we fill in progressively the details of that hor- 
monious organization of insight which, as ideal and standard, is 
ever before us. On the other hand, the true principles of logic, 
mathematics, and all other fields, are not made true by the indi- 
vidual's thinking nor falsified by the individual's failure to think 
them. Truth, for us, is the growing interpretation, and expression 
in symbols, of the meanings of reality — of its structure and order. 
Our partial grasp of the order of reality must be an approximation, 
however imperfect, to the reality itself. Our interpretations of 
that order may need, from time to time, radical revisiqn. We 
cannot foresee the changes that are yet to come in the creative but 
orderly process of the whole but these changes must themselves be 
the expression of the fundamental order. Only thus can we think 
of universe, totality, cosmic process. There must then be one 
objective and intelligible order which corresponds (though we may 
not, now or ever, fully know just how in detail this correspondence 
works out) to the standard of a self-coherent or harmonious totality. 
The organizing and conserving order of the universe throughout 
its history must be an active reason or intelligence. In tracing out 
the lineaments of the cosmical order on the fields of nature and 
human history we are learning, step by step, the character of the 



476 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

supreme order, and we are realizing our rational individuality by 
coming into conscious harmony with that order. 

Thus, we are led, from a consideration of the spatial and tem- 
poral continuity of the world and from a consideration of the 
nature of truth, to the notion of a cosmic will or dynamic intelli- 
gence as the ground of the world order. Whether this order-power 
works in the face of external obstructions is a question we shall 
consider later. Before we do so, we shall consider the place of 
values and of selves in relation to the supreme order. 

III. The Cosmic Gkound of Values 

Truth is one form of value. But it is basic to all other forms 
of value. The validity of all values, which means, in the final 
analysis, their cosmic standing, depends on the validity of the 
truth-value. Pragmatic and instrumentalist conceptions of truth, 
which would reduce it to the position of a tool or instrument to 
further values extrinsic to itself — such as emotional satisfactions, 
so-called practical ends, and "social welfare" — reduce all values 
to mere ephemeral tracings on the shifting sands of the purely 
human. Subjectivism is not escaped by appeal to the social, or 
even universally human, character of desire and need. Unless 
truth have an objective and cosmic reference, humanity is hope- 
lessly and forever shut up within its own skin; its deepest and 
noblest sentiments are naught but human illusions, vain imagin- 
ings, unless the human intellect can somehow lay hold, however 
feebly and gropingly, on the nature of things. Whatsoever cosmic 
status other values may have, they can have it only as being in 
harmony with the real objective order as apprehended by reason. 

Goodness is the quality of sentiments (organized dispositions 
to feel and act) and of volitions (sentiments in action). Good- 
ness appertains only to conscious and intelligent life. Beauty, 
whether of nature, art, or personal character, has no meaning and 
no existence apart from conscious and intelligent life. The cosmic 
status of goodness and beauty depends on the perduration, in the 
cosmic order, of conscious and rational life. Truth is the most 
comprehensive and fundamental and enduring harmony between 
conscious life, as capable of reflection upon the objective condi- 
tions of its own being, and the cosmic order. Therefore the 
objective and cosmic standing of all values depends on the per- 



UNIVERSAL ORDER 477 

duration and prosperity of conscious and reflective life. By "pros- 
perity" I mean, not merely the conservation of such life but, as 
well, its qualitative increase. 

Thus, the order of conscious and intelligent life must be the 
key to the ruling purport of the cosmos, when we think of this 
in terms of values. Thus the supreme principle of order and 
continuity may be properly described as an overself, a super- 
person, or, perhaps better, a spiritual society or community of 
selfhood. It must be much more than a self or person, in the 
sense in which we immediately experience and reflectively know 
the entities for which these terms stand. Each one of us is an 
imperfect spiritual community living in interpersonal or social re- 
lations. We can make no hard and fast separation of our intra- 
personal and our interpersonal lives. By analogy, I would de- 
scribe the supreme ground of values as the perfection of selfhood, 
which is, by that very fact, the perfect community or society. 

Our hypothesis is incapable of absolute proof, since such proof 
would require that we should know the general structure or char- 
acter of the total cosmos. It is based on the only kind of argu- 
ment which is relevant in this case. If reality be a cosmos, order, 
or system, it must have a continuity of structure and meaning. 
The realm of intelligible meanings and values cannot be abso- 
lutely sundered from the total character of the real. The latter 
cannot include, as a part of itself, as an ephemeral by-product of 
its blind and insensate ongoing, an order of meanings and values 
and of life in which these inhere, but to which the total cosmic 
order is utterly alien and hostile. For, if the cosmos as a whole 
be a brute insensate procession of merely physical forces, it is 
alien and hostile, simply because it is indifferent, to meanings 
and values. Such a supposition makes the eruption and the ac- 
tivity and continuance of life and its values, for however brief a 
moment in the eternities of the cosmic whirl of atoms, the most 
unaccountable and stupendous of miracles. It makes life the 
momentary by-product of a lifeless world, values and meanings 
the momentary fermentations of a meaningless and valueless 
cosmos. Since our universe is a part of the cosmos, the meanings 
and values of life in our universe must be somehow continuous 
with the whole meaning and structure of the cosmos. Of course 
we do not and cannot know just what transformations life and 
its values undergo in the total order ; but it cannot be transf orma- 



478 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

tion to the point of extinction of selfhood and its values ; it must 
be rather the continuance and increase of these. 

The doctrine of absolute or singularistic idealism, that all 
finite selves are literally existential elements in the absolute self, 
mind, or experient, is based chiefly on the supposed analogy be- 
tween mental systems (affective, ideational and volitional com- 
plexes) considered as elements in the total organized life of a 
human self or person, and the life of a human self considered as 
one constituent in the life of the absolute. Just as I am made 
up, psychically, of a considerable number of fairly well-organized 
and distinct dispositions which, in their interrelations, constitute 
my total personality, so the absolute is made up of all finite 
selves, human, subhuman and superhuman, organized into a unity. 
Just as I am a sort of society, so the absolute is a super-society. 

On critical examination this analogy breaks down. In a 
normal self the various subsystems or ideational complexes, which 
constitute the dynamic content of the personality, have nothing 
closely corresponding to the distinctness, privacy and self-determi- 
nation of the whole individual in relation to other individuals. 
The ideational complexes are distinguishable phases of the self, 
not distinct existents. I am an imperfectly organized self, com- 
pacted of a variety of impulsive, emotive and ideational factors. 
Nevertheless, whatever degree of personality I may be, that I am 
as one living whole — private, self -determining and relatively self- 
existent. No finite self is included in me nor I in any other, so 
far as I know. I have facets to my personality, but, unless my 
personality is in a state of disintegration, I am one self. 

The diseases of personalities do not support the absolutist's 
contention. If there are really two or more selves in one body, 
then each of these is a distinct and self-determining personality. 
They do not literally share in one another's being. If they did 
they would cease to be two. Two friends or lovers, no matter 
how close their affinities, do not cease to be two. If they did 
the meaning and zest of the whole relationship would disappear. 
As a matter of fact a dissociated or diseased self is not an inte- 
grated personality at all. 10 In it the various complexes oscillate 
in control, or some aberrational complex wins the upper hand, 
just because of the weakness of the function of nervous and mental 

10 Cf. Chaps. 25 and 26. 



UNIVERSAL ORDER 479 

integration. An absolute self constructed after this analogy would 
be a mere aggregate or warring collection of imperfect finite 
personalities — not one perfectly unified and all-inclusive self. 

We have no sufficient grounds for supposing that one rational 
self can be literally included in another. A universal self, which 
includes and synthesizes into a perfect unity the lives of all im- 
perfect and changing selves, could not be a self at all. Selves 
exist only in relation to other selves. An absolute which includes 
and transmutes all finite selves is not a self, and, in the process 
of transmutation, the finite selves must lose all that constitutes 
selfhood. Thus the singularistic idealist pays a heavy price for 
his one — the finite self dissolves into a phantom, and only by doing 
violence to the logic of experience can he find his absolute self. 

If there be an over-self it must be distinct, in its existence, 
from all finite selves and they from it. It must be the creative 
or originating and sustaining ground of the order of the cosmos 
and of the lives and values of finite personalities, the conservator 
of the order of values. I can attach no definite meaning to the 
notion of an impersonal all-inclusive spirit, conceived as the suffi- 
cient ground of reality and values. Either there is no cosmos, 
and no cosmic principle of order or ground of values, or the prin- 
ciple and ground is an over-self, a spiritual community, of which 
the highest finite personality is our best available adumbration, 
however imperfect a foreshadowing it be. If there be no over- 
self then finite selves are not only the highest beings in the uni- 
verse, but they are higher and worthier beings than the chaos 
which has engendered, and will engulf, these paradoxially tragic 
beings which are able to rebel against, to judge and condemn, the 
insensate welter of physicochemical transformations. A single 
human self has more of value in it than an infinite chaos of atoms 
or electrons. To talk about meanings and values inhering or 
enduring in a so-called universe in which personalities are ac- 
counted merely transitory elements is to talk nonsense. Conscious 
and rational life must be supreme in an intelligible cosmos. 

' Monistic Theism — the doctrine that all nature is subordinate 
to one spiritual being, from which finite selves are existentially 
distinct, but to which they are similar in kind and therefore re- 
lated — is a logical doctrine. Dualistic Theism — the doctrine that 
there is a recalcitrant factor, a cosmical obstacle to the full real- 
ization of values — is likewise a logical doctrine (the problem of 



480 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

evil will be discussed later). Pantheistic idealism and pantheistic 
naturalism are, for different reasons, illogical and inconsistent 
theories. Pantheistic idealism, in its attempt to conserve the 
meanings and values of selfhood by including all selves in the 
absolute self, sacrifices selfhood on the altar of an impersonal 
unity, and thereby cuts the roots from under all values. 

Pantheistic naturalism invites us to value and worship a uni- 
verse of physical and unconscious energies by the application to 
these of the misleading honorific adjective "infinite." But, since 
all meanings and values must go down to shipwreck and extinction, 
if personality be an epiphenomenon, the so-called universe of the 
naturalist is unworthy of valuation and reverence. In such case, 
if we still must worship, let us worship man. For, weak and 
erring though he be, man is worthier than an infinite and eternal 
blind whirl of energies, since he alone can feel and think and 
will and dream — alone can invent and serve truth, justice, love, 
and beauty. 

APPENDIX 

THE MEANINGS OE THE INFINITE 

The word "infinite," like many other philosophical terms, covers 
a number of equivocations. The following are its chief meanings: 

1. The indefinitely great, that which is greater than any assign- 
able quantity, in magnitude, number, duration or intensity. When 
people speak of infinite space, force, time, or of one entity as being 
infinitely better than another, what they have in mind is inability 
to measure. What they really mean is "indefinitely" larger, greater, 
longer, better, etc. 

2. The second meaning of the infinite is the unlimited, the un- 
bounded; for example the absolute boundlessness of space, the abso- 
lute endlessness of time, the absolute inexhaustibleness of energy, the 
endless duration of life. 

3. The infinite as the perfect or self -complete ; as including all 
forms of values in the highest degree possible. In this, which is 
peculiarly the metaphysical, meaning of the infinite there can be 
of course only one infinite, the absolute reality or ground of the 
universe in its unity and totality. The infinite in this sense of per- 
fection and self-completeness would be wholly self-active and self- 
contained; in short perfect in power, knowledge or insight and feel- 
ing. There could be for it no opaque facts, no unattainable desires, 
no gaps between will and deed, no irresolvable disharmonies. 



UNIVERSAL ORDER 481 

The infinite as the indefinitely great is nothing actual. It is 
simply a misleading expression for vagueness in human thinking 
and incapacity to measure or estimate. JSTo matter how vast the 
actual magnitude of the space world, of the number of elements in 
it, or of the differences of degree in quality, all these things must be 
finite in the sense of being definite in quantity, number, and rela- 
tion. Nothing that exists in time strictly speaking can be endless. 
Anything that may exist endlessly, exists eternally, is a timeless 
existence. 

Since space is not a kind of separate existence, but the system 
of relations between contemporaneous existents, space in itself can- 
not be actually boundless nor bounded. The whole of reality can- 
not exist in space. Nor can reality actually consist now of innu- 
merable entities, for an innumerable number is not a real number. 
The real elements of the universe must, at any moment, be a definite 
and actual number. The proposition that there actually exists an 
infinite number of things is tantamount to saying that the world 
is in endless process of change, so that incessantly things come into 
being and cease to be. An unreal number or an endless series means 
that at any moment there is a finite number of things and a series 
that is never to be completed. Since space is the system of relations 
between simultaneously existing things, and since the latter must at 
any instant be an actual or finite number, space is finite. Since time is 
the form of change, the relation of succession and every change and 
succession is finite, the actual endlessness or infinitude of time is a 
misleading way of asserting the reality of eternal or changeless being. 
Whether belief in the reality of eternal being is consistent with the 
temporal character of our actual world is a question which I will 
discuss fully in Chapter XXXVII. 

The "new infinite 5 ' of mathematical speculation is frequently put 
forward as affording a definite solution of the philosophical problem 
of the infinite. I shall discuss this new infinite very briefly, for the 
purpose of showing that it does not solve the problem of the actual 
infinite in the sense of the reality of self-completeness or perfection. 11 

The "new infinite" is a new definition of infinity derived from 

"From the large and growing literature on this subject I select for 
reference, B. Eussell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Chaps. 6 and 7; 
and Mysticism and Logic, pp. 84 ff. ; Eussell and Whitehead, Principles of 
Mathematics (see index); L. Couturat, L'Infini Mathematique ; B. Russell, 
Introduction to Mathematical Phisosophy; Josiah Eoyce, The World and the 
Individual, Vol. I, Supplementary Essay; EL Poincare, The Value of Science, 
and Science and Method; William James, Some Problems of Philosophy, Chaps. 
10 and 11; and my article on "The Infinite New and Old," Philosophical 
Beview, Vol. xiii, pp. 497-513; J. S. Mackenzie, Elements of Constructive 
Philosophy, Bk. iii, Chap. 3. 



482 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

the property of number series. All number series are indefinitely 
continuable series growing according to perfectly defined laws of 
order. Take, for example, the series of positive whole numbers, the 
series of even numbers, and the series of numbers which are squares 
of the whole numbers : 

0, 1, 2, 3, 4 n 

0, 2, 4, 6, 8 n 

0, 1, 4, 9, 16 n 

The other two series are contained Jn the first series but to every 
number in the first series is a corresponding number in the other 
series, since all the series are endless. The series are in one-one 
correspondence. Thus an infinite whole is one which corresponds to 
a proper part of itself. Any class is infinite if its parts are numer- 
ically similar to itself. Such groups of series are endlessly self- 
representative ; each member of the group represents the whole group 
of series adequately. Thus, as Eussell tells us, infinite numbers 
differ from finite numbers in two respects. First, an infinite number 
is not increased by adding one to it. Given an infinite collection, 
any finite collection may be added to or taken away from it without 
increasing or diminishing the number of the whole, as in the number 
series given above. Second, since all finite numbers are increased 
by the addition of one, the principle of mathematical induction 
holds good of finite numbers but not of infinite numbers. 

The similarity or one-one correspondence between whole and part 
in the new infinite solves, it is said, Zeno's paradox of the Achilles 
and the other classical problems of the infinitesimal. The path trav- 
ersed by the tortoise in a given time is a part of the path traversed 
by Achilles in the same time; thus there is a one-one correspondence 
between the infinite number of points in each stride of Achilles and 
each step of the tortoise ; therefore Achilles can overtake the tortoise. 
But this explanation assumes, as James pointed out, that an infinite 
number of points has in both cases been traversed in finite time, 
whereas the real problem is as to how any being can pass through 
an infinite number of points in a finite time. The way out of this 
difficulty is to say that the finite stretch of time consists in an 
infinite number of instants corresponding to the infinite number of 
points in the different stretches traversed by Achilles and the tortoise. 
But all these instants are timeless. They cannot by addition consti- 
tute a finite stretch of time, any more than an infinite number of 
zeroes can constitute a positive finite quantity. As James says, whoso 
actually traverses a continuum can do so by no process continuous in 
the mathematical sense. Be it short or long, each step in the journey 



UNIVERSAL ORDER 483 

must be occupied in its due order of succession. If the steps are 
necessarily infinite in number, their end can never be reached, for 
the remainder in this kind of process is just what one cannot neglect. 
By the method of one-one correspondence neither Achilles nor the 
tortoise would ever get in motion at all. The only solution is to 
say with M. Bergson that each step is an indivisible movement and 
every real time a finite duration. Mathematical time is a generic 
concept for all finite durations, mathematical distance a generic con- 
cept for all finite distances, mathematical motion a generic concept 
for all finite motions. There are no actual infinitesimals in space, 
motion, and time. 

The various number series are not equal in numerical magnitude 
at any stage in the indefinitely continued operation of enumerating 
them. They are never actual infinites. They are endlessly growing 
finites; in other words they are perfectly well-defined formulae for 
the indefinite continuance of recurrent operations of thought. Writers 
such as Dedekind and Royce conceive the positive nature of the 
infinite to be the capacity for endless self-representation, of which 
number series form striking examples. Imagine a map of a country 
situated in a certain part of the country; then to be perfect the map 
should contain a map of itself and so on endlessly. But this is a 
process of self-representation which can never be completed. Like 
the number series, it is a case of the indefinite recurrence of an 
operation which can never actually be completed. Dedekind draws 
from the mind's power of self-representation the proof that there 
actually exist such infinite systems. 12 But such an argument, to be 
valid, would have to assume that in one's self -consciousness one could 
represent wholly and completely the whole series of thoughts possible 
through endless time. An omniscient thinker, to be actually infinite 
in thought, would have to possess a sun-clear intuition of all possible 
objects of thought. Thus the human type of complete self -repre- 
sentation would be, in an endless series of self-representations, end- 
less in the sense of never-completed; but not an act of intellectual 
intuition in which a being should grasp all at once in a single in- 
sight all the possible objects of his thoughts and their relationships. 
The human mind's power of self -representation is finite in two senses 
— (1) it never completely and translucently penetrates all the objects 
of its thought; (2) at any moment the objects of its actual thought 
are but a small selection from the possible objects of thought. A 
perfect self -representation would not be a representation at all, but 
an intuitive penetration and comprehension of the whole universe of 



12 See Dedekind: Essays on Number. 



484 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

not-self in self. The actual infinite, if such there be, must be a being 
self-complete and perfect, self-existent, self-contained, self-moving. 
Such a being would be infinite in power in the sense that he would 
be unhindered and unlimited by any power independent of himself 
in its origin and existence; infinite in knowledge in the sense that 
there would be no data or facts through which his insight would 
not completely penetrate and which would not blend in the totality 
of his insight; infinite in goodness in the sense that there would be 
in his willing or self-activity no conflict of motives, no opposition 
between desire and volition. 

There is a distinction between self-completeness and perfection. 
A finite being or even a work of art may be perfect after its kind, 
but only the infinite universe can be self-complete. If, however, we 
take perfection to mean the absence of defect or limitation, no finite 
being can attain perfection. 

The metaphysical infinite may be conceived theistically, pan- 
theistically or pluralistically. For theism God is the one self-com- 
plete being who includes all forms of perfection. He has an inner 
life which transcends the life of the world. The world is derived 
from and dependent upon Him; nothing in it can take place inde- 
pendently of His will, but He may by an act of self -limitation endow 
finite selves with a limited power to choose and hence to err. From 
this standpoint the imperfection in the world, its suffering and evil, 
are elements in the divine plan. These defects do not constitute 
limitations imposed upon God, but are factors in the order of the 
universe which, as the expression of God's perfection, must as a 
whole be good, however imperfect its parts. 

The pantheistic infinite is the identification of the absolute or 
perfect being with the wholly immanent spirit of the universe. God, 
the one being absolutely infinite as Spinoza puts it, is identical with 
the whole indwelling principle of totality or unity by virtue of which 
the universe is a universe and not a mere heap or aggregate of un- 
related parts. In other words the infinite is the principle of cosmic 
unity, the detis sive natura, of Spinoza. When the pantheist conceives 
a cosmic unity as being, not an impersonal principle of unity, but 
a personal or superpersonal principle, he has passed beyond pan- 
theism. For a self-conscious center essentially transcends, in its 
inner life, all others, however intimate its relation to its others. 

If the universe be conceived, as it is for example by Mr. J. M. 
E. McTaggart, 13 as an eternal system or society of finite beings, who 
are fundamental differentiations of the absolute, we have an infinfte 

u See his Studies in Hegelian Cosmology and Some Problems of Religion. 






UNIVERSAL ORDER 485 

which consists of a permanent system of finite beings in relation — 
one infinite which is the impersonal unity of a plurality of persons. 
Thus we have a synthesis of singularism and pluralism. This 
synthesis is the only logical form of pantheism. For either the 
infinite, as the principle of cosmic unity, is a self which transcends 
all the finite members of whose relations it is the ground, or it is an 
impersonal principle of unity. The logic of Spinoza's pantheism or 
of Hegel's, if indeed Hegel was a pantheist, requires some such con- 
ception as that of Dr. McTaggart. 



CHAPTER XXXVI 

FINITE SELVES AND THE OVER-SELF 

In the previous chapter we rejected the notion that an im- 
personal ground of the world could be the ground of personality 
and value. We also rejected the notion that the cosmic ground 
could be a person which literally contains, as parts of, or elements 
in, its experience, all finite selves. We denied that a person could 
be a mere fragment of another person. But how can finite per- 
sons have any existence of their own, if they are dependent on 
the cosmic ground ? And how can the cosmic ground be a unity 
if it be not impersonal ? These are problems of exceeding great 
importance and difficulty which we must consider. 

I have called the cosmic ground an over-self. This means that 
while it contains, in a more eminent sense, what we mean by 
personality, it must be super personal; it must transcend finite 
selfhood. Perhaps we shall find the best clue to reconcile the im- 
manence of the over-self in nature and man with the transcendence 
that must belong to it, if it be not impersonal but superpersonal, 
if we suppose that the over-self is the union in higher degree of 
what we mean by "Personality" and "Community." 

First, a few words on the immanence of spirit in nature. 

I remind the reader here of the argument developed in previ- 
ous chapters that the aesthetic emotion of kinship with nature 
(of which the feelings of beauty, picturesqueness, grandeur and 
sublimity, with which one contemplates the varied aspects of 
nature as living wholes of individual significance are phases) con- 
stitutes an important ground for belief in a spirit immanent in 
nature. Since man feels a harmony between himself and nature, 
when the latter is perceived as a living and significant whole, the 
scientific analysis of nature can do no more than lay bare, at best, 
the skeleton of the world. The flesh and blood of nature's living 
individuality is apprehended only through the concrete poetic in- 
tuition of the nature lover. In the aesthetic emotion # man enters 
into immediate communion with the spiritual life expressed in 



FINITE SELVES AND OVERrSELF 487 

the natural order. There is no necessary inconsistency between 
the scientific conceptions of nature and the intuitions of the 
nature lover. Scientific analysis, properly understood, enhances 
man's aesthetic relations to nature, since it deepens and clarifies 
his immediate sense of nature's meanings. On the other hand, 
the aesthetic contemplation of nature clothes the abstract skeleton 
of scientific concepts with the rich qualitative variety, individual- 
ity, and living harmony of concrete intuition. Perceptual ex- 
perience takes on its full meaning only when it is suffused by 
aesthetic feeling. The poets are not vain dreamers of subjective 
fancies, and there need be no quarrel between science and poetry. 
Scientific analysis of nature furnishes the intellectual framework 
of a more meaningful and profound poetic integration of nature 
in its spiritual character. The total and immediate intuition of 
the nature-lover sees the scientific framework filled with life and 
value. The aesthetic communion of man with nature is unintel- 
ligible on any other hypothesis than that nature, in its individual 
forms and its totality, is the self-manifestation of spirit. 

But how can an over-self or superperson be conceived to be 
immanent in human nature, since the human person seems in 
essence to exclude the immanence in it of any other self? Is 
there any sense in which it might be said that one personal spirit 
is immanent in another without absorbing that other into its inner 
being? I think there is. First, let us consider in what sense a 
human person can not be a part of an absolute self. 

Finite selves are never perfect personalities. We are partly 
things and partly persons. As things enmeshed in the system of 
the spatial-dynamic world, we are eddies in the physical con- 
tinuum, local and temporal centers in the universal motion-system 
of the material universe. As things we are insubstantial imper- 
manent pseudo-individuals. As things we are transitory modi- 
fications of the flowing cosmical energies which are the manifes- 
tations of the world will. 

Finite selves in their truer and inner being are not mere frag- 
ments of a whole, not mere bits of an absolute continuum. In 
their inner being they are severally real and unique — self-feeling, 
self-determining centers of experience and deed. In this regard 
finite selves cannot be mere contents of an infinite and absolute 
self. The will of a finite self is not a bit of the absolute will. 
The consciousness of a finite self is not a mere content of an ab- 



488 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

solute consciousness. Nearly all the arguments of the absolute 
monist or singularist on this score involve the fallacious assump- 
tion that to know anything truly and wholly one must be that 
which one knows, that to feel utter sympathy one must be the 
person one sympathizes with, that to cooperate in willing, one's 
own will must be existentially identical with the will with which 
one cooperates ; and, in brief, that to be truly related to anything 
one must be part of that to which one is related. It is assumed 
that, if the supreme self know and sympathize with my life, or 
I with his life, we must really be the same self. I must, then, 
as knower, sympathizer, or cooperating will, be part of the su- 
preme self, and he must be fragmentarily identical with me. 

If finite selves are parts of the over-self and nothing more, such 
a being in all his knowing knows only himself, in all his willing 
wills only himself, in all his love loves only himself. If this were 
true then the over-self would not be a person in any sense that 
is intelligible to human beings. A self that has no objects of 
knowledge but himself cannot be truly self-conscious, since selves 
are conscious only in relation to an "other," self or thing. If I 
have only my actual self to love I cannot be said truly to love. 
If I will nothing but my actual self I do not will anything. 

The assumption of the numerical identity, the existential 
fusion, of related selves does not hold good in human relationships, 
and therefore one cannot understand how it can hold good for 
the relationships of the human self to a supreme self. Finite 
selves are not lost and merged in one another's lives, by growing 
into an understanding and appreciation of one another's experi- 
ence. A person does not cease to be individual, by the deepening 
and expansion of his insight and his sympathies. My will is not 
become identical with your will because we will in harmony. Two 
friends do not cease to be two by virtue of the complete reciprocity 
of their friendship. Even "two hearts that beat as one, two souls 
with but a single thought" do not merge in a higher impersonal 
identity. If they did all the zest of their so feeling and thinking 
would disappear. Love is an expansion of individuality through 
relationship, not a disappearance of individuality. 

The actuality and possibility of all sorts of relationships be- 
tween selves, as members of a systematic whole, does not imply 
that selves are merely elements in an absolute self or impersonal 
spirit. If it were so, as the singularistic absolutist asserts, we 



FINITE SELVES AND OVER-SELF 489 

could be haters, murderers, lovers, saviors, neighbors, mothers-in- 
law, and so on through the entire gamut of human relationships, 
only because we are all alike parts of the absolute. All our sep- 
arate finite experiences would be merged in the all-devouring maw 
of the absolute experience, but as to how and what became of 
them in the absolute we could have no inkling. 

I feel a pain, am in error, tell a lie, fall in love, and so on 
through the gamut of human experience. My experiences cannot 
enter into an absolute experience as constituent elements thereof 
without being altered. If I am really nothing but a part of an 
absolute, my finite, erring selfhood has no reality of its own. 
My sense of unique selfhood is an illusion. On the other hand, 
if one recognize that the finite self is real as such, it may be 
known to a supreme knower, both as it is for itself and as it is 
for him. I may in some degree know you both as you think you 
are and as I think you are in contrast with what you think your- 
self to be. If I can know and harmoniously share my friend's 
feelings and thoughts without being that friend, surely a supreme 
self might know us all without our merging into him ! 

Since, in the matter of conscious experience, to be is to be 
felt or known in some way, if my being be real only in and for 
the all-knower, then my being as I am for myself is unreal. But 
since to feel is to be as an experient, my conscious being as it is 
for me in my personal feeling must be real in some degree. For 
the time being I am as "good" a reality as anything whatsoever. 
To make finite selfhood simply a constituent element, existing 
no one knows how, in the experience of the absolute self, is to 
"de-realize' ' the finite self, and to put in its place an empty 
abstraction. For, if my feelings and purposes, as I have them, 
are not real, what actual basis is left for determining the char- 
acter of an ultimate reality obtained by merging and losing all 
finite selves in an abstract absolute unity? There is no more 
ground for assuming the existential oneness of a finite person 
and a supreme self than there is for admitting the existential 
identity of two finite persons — no ground at all, in short. 

Finite selves enter into a great variety of relationships — 
spatial and temporal, affectional, volitional, and cognitive. They 
may likewise be in a variety of relationships to the supreme self. 
They may be ignorant of him, indifferent to him, hostile, friendly 
or devoted. 



490 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

The universe of persons, which alone realizes the mean- 
ings and intrinsic values to which the universes of insentient 
nature and of organic nature are tributary, is a society of selves. 
The supreme self, if such exist, must be the ultimate example and 
type of selfhood, the source and sustainer of the intrinsic values 
of the society of finite selves, and also the unifier and director of 
nature, which is, in turn, the theater for the realization of finite 
selfhood. Finite selves may indefinitely progress in their degrees 
of inner harmony of will and insight, and proportionately prog- 
ress in their harmony with the supreme self. We know and feel 
and act with other selves because of a community of character — 
a community of spirit, of ideals, and purposes. The ultimate 
source of this rational and ethical community of life must be the 
supreme source of selfhood. We know nature as the theater and 
instrumentality of human social and personal life. It is the 
meeting place of selves, the medium of their interactions and 
intercommunions. The unity and interconnection of nature with 
selves, and of selves with one another, points us to the concep- 
tion of the ultimate ground of order as the great other spirit or 
over-self, who sustains the order of nature and the order of hu- 
manity, and progressively manifests himself as creative source, 
in the ascending scale of individualities from the material indi- 
viduum or center of physical activity up to the most fully har- 
monized rational and social selfhood. 

The extreme singularist and the extreme pluralist are alike 
guilty of the same fallacy in their treatment of selfhood, that of 
assuming that the uniqueness and individuality of a finite self 
involves its absolute impenetrability. They conceive the finite 
self as a self-enclosed particular. The singularist asserts that, if 
the finite self has any independent being it must be wholly im- 
pervious to relationships ; and therefore the world is a chaos unless 
all so-called finite selves are mere fragments of an absolute self. 
If there be more than one ultimately real self there is chaos, says 
the monistic absolutist. 

The extreme pluralist asserts equally that selves are mutually 
impenetrable and that their relations are wholly external, there- 
fore selves cannot form an organized whole of communicating 
lives. Each one is forever shut up tight in his own skin. Thus 
we have Leibniz's "windowless monads"; and, then, in order to 
explain their relations, the artificial and inconsistent, though 






FINITE SELVES AND OVER-SELF 491 

necessary, hypothesis of a supreme governing monad who is the 
ground of the preestablished harmony of activities among the 
monads. 

In contrast with both these positions, the truer view starts 
from the principle that selves, though existentially distinct cen- 
ters of feeling and deed, are not shut out from one another's lives 
by impenetrable and unscalable walls. The kinds and degrees of 
intimacy of relations between selves are various. We cannot 
enumerate all the types of mediate, intermediate, and immediate 
relationships, not only because these are at any moment so nu- 
merous and complex but also because, in a dynamic universe, re- 
lationships change and evolve with the evolution of the elements 
of reality. 

It is passing strange that this erroneous theory of the mutual 
impenetrability, the ultimate incommunicability, of selves should 
be advanced by some who would justify a religious view of reality. 
For the deepest and, philosophically, the most defensible type of 
religious life is an enlightened mysticism which finds and feels 
the working of the cosmical spirit in the life of inner personal 
experience; and in the course of man's spiritual history traces, 
by the light of this immediate living presence to the individual 
soul, the growing manifestation of that spirit. Such a mysticism 
is intellectually justified by its close analogy with the aesthetic 
experience and the higher interpersonal emotions. Historically, 
it is justified by the part which it has played in the work of 
prophets and reformers, in the rejuvenescence and purification of 
religions. If its validity cannot be proved to those who have felt 
no touch of it, on the other hand, no new discoveries of natural 
science or historical criticism can invalidate it. Moreover, the 
presumption is that those who have it not at all are deficient or 
blind in the matter of a worthful and significant experience, as 
are those who have no eyes for the beauties of nature, or no 
hearts for friendship and love. 

The doctrine of the absolute impenetrability of selves is then 
an error. We finite selves are separated by our bodies. We are 
kept apart still more by our cross-purposes and conflicting desires, 
by our self-will, our stupid blindness and lack of sympathetic and 
rational insight. But we are never wholly kept apart. Friends 
and lovers do live in and through one another. We do at times 
seem to have immediate and vivid insight into one another's inner 



492 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

lives. We are able to merge our narrow, blind, egotistical lives 
in other lives of sympathetic insight and self-forgetting devotion. 
We can and do save ourselves as rational and spiritual persons 
by dying to our exclusive and blindly irrational biological self- 
hood. Indeed, immediate intuition or insight is the normal man- 
ner of knowing another self. We do not first observe the motions 
of another body and then, by a deliberate process of inference, 
project a mental self into it. This explanation of the way in 
which one self knows another is a construction of the psychologist 
and epistemologist. Immediate knowledge comes first, differen- 
tiation and analysis afterwards. Eound-about inferential knowl- 
edge of other selves is intermediate between naive immediate 
insight, and the higher insight based on community of ideas and 
sentiments amongst peers. 

St. John and St. Paul, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eck- 
hart and Jacob Boehme, Spinoza, Eichte and Hegel, Shelley, 
Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning, and many another mystical 
poet, seer, and philosopher may have been right in affirming the 
intercommunicability of selves. 

In normal life the tremendous and generally unnoticed influ- 
ence of suggestion, the divining by friend and lover of another's 
attitude of feeling and thought, the whole swift immediacy of 
psychical rapport on which the interest and zest of our intimate 
social intercourse so much depend — all point to the intercom- 
municability of personal life as an integral part of the goal of 
selfhood. No wonder that, hampered as we seem to be by our 
bodies, differing as we do in the varied play of our stresses in 
language and gestures, with conflicting interests and cross pur- 
poses, our lives often seem wholly private and isolated. And yet 
probably every self hungers at times to lay itself bare before 
some other self, to throw away its masks and be its own naked 
reality, however scarred and specked, in the sympathetic presence 
of some other loving and forgiving self. As selves grow in ration- 
ality of insight, in universality of outlook and aim, in sympathy 
and wisdom, they become more and more intercommunicative. 

In brief, in the most intimate and significant human relation- 
ships, the spirit of one person may be immanent in another with- 
out either losing their distinctness. After years of happy wedded 
life a man and woman will each show the working of the other's 
spirit without either losing their own individuality. Indeed, the 



FINITE SELVES AND OVER-SELF 493 

better the union the more genial the atmosphere for the develop- 
ment of the essential personality. The like is true in deep and 
lasting friendships. And are not the spirits of the creative heroes 
of the spirit — of poets and sages, of prophets and revealers, of 
great lovers of their kind and great lovers of beauty and truth 
— immanent in kindred spirits through all time? Are not the 
spirits of Plato, Jesus, Gotama, Socrates, Virgil, Shakespeare, 
Spinoza, Goethe, alive as immanent in these who are inspired by 
them throughout the ages ? 

If the above be literal fact, as I believe, then we may carry 
the argument on and say — the over-self, the superpersonal spirit 
is immanent in humanity in the sense that, as men respond to the 
incitements and materials for spiritual development that his ever 
energizing life offers to them, they become partial incarnations of 
his spirit. 

The supreme spirit would then be the conservator of all the 
intrinsic values of selfhood — the self for whom all truth is valid, 
in whose purposive will perfect goodness is embodied, of whose 
creative life beauty is the adequate expression. In the supreme 
self the so-called eternal truths, which are adumbrated in our 
finite minds by the principles of logic and mathematics, and by 
whatever other principles of truth there may be, are the laws of 
operation of his creative thinking. Similarly, the values of good- 
ness must be directive principles of his activity. The first prin- 
ciples of knowledge are the constitutive logical principles of any 
world. Just so the intrinsic ethical values are the conditions of 
the life of personality, and the values of beauty and personal 
emotion are the conditions of harmonious self-expression and self- 
fulfillment. 

The over-self cannot be infinite in the sense of being an in- 
definite potentiality of any imaginable kind of action, thought, 
or feeling. That would be a false infinite. He could not, for 
instance, be a cosmical liar or be self-contradictory in his thought 
or will. Moreover, if he affirms the reality of other selves, he 
must respect that reality. He can do no violence to the ethical 
nature of selves. And he can only be a self by finding his own 
self-fulfillment and self-satisfaction through the growth of finite 
selves in self-fulfillment. A self who was alone in the universe, 
or who alone was the universe, would be no genuine self. The 
supreme self may not be limited by any externally imposed phys- 



494 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

ical conditions, but lie must be conditioned in his own self -deter- 
mining life by his own concrete spiritual nature or character, and 
by the character and conditions of the finite selves who are the 
members of the universe nearest to himself in nature. Whether 
the supreme self calls finite selves into being in time, or whether 
these are eternal coexistents with him, is a question not suscep- 
tible of dogmatic answer perhaps. I have already indicated that 
I believe the evidence to be in favor of the view that finite selves 
originate in the world process. Whether any factor independent 
of the supreme self is operative in this process is a question to 
be discussed in a following chapter. 

The over-self must be at once universal and individual. He 
must be the most concrete universal, and the most universal indi- 
vidual. He is the supreme individual, since his creative thought 
or world-determining volition issues in the formation and susten- 
tation of a cosmos or whole which has the determinate character 
of a coherent system. In other words, his world is an individual 
whole inclusive of many grades of finite individuality. He, as 
the ultimate ground of this individual whole, must be the perfect 
individual, the final source of all differentiation and unification. 
He must be universal, since he is the source of all individuation; 
that is, he determines the position, qualities and relations of each 
element in the total system of the real. The distinction and sepa- 
ration of the "that" from the "what," the looseness of existence 
from content, as Mr. Bradley is always saying, which obtains for 
us,' because given facts remain partly opaque and disjointed, can- 
not exist for him, since there can be for him no "brute" externally 
given "thats." He can have no need of our abstract general con- 
cepts or laws. These we abstract from the similarities of particu- 
lars which in part resist our efforts to comprehend them in their 
systematic relations. Thus our concepts or "universals" seem to 
stand outside the particulars whose similarities they represent. 
We are not able to see how they cohere into a complete system 
or cosmos, although insight into the latter is the ideal goal of 
knowledge, towards which we do make measurable progress. The 
place and character of every particular in the universe must be 
translucent to the over-self, since it is defined by his creative 
thinking. 

The knowledge of his world by the over-self must be direct or 
immediate and intuitive. If he could know me only inferentially, 



FINITE SELVES AND OVER-SELF 495 

his knowledge would be of a piece-meal growing character, always 
liable to error and less adequate than my own knowledge of things 
and, more especially, of selves. For human knowledge is not, in 
its more adequate forms, purely discursive. In knowing things, 
and still more in knowing selves, the foundation of thought is 
immediate experience. In perception the mind is in immediate 
contact with things and the function of discursive reasoning is to 
organize, interpret, and illuminate the immediate data of experi- 
ence. The goal of thought's activity in the field of perceptual 
experience is the achievement of a higher immediacy — a harmoni- 
ous and articulated intuition of reality. Reason sets the datum of 
sense in its context and relationships. In the knowledge of other 
selves the intuitional factor plays a still greater part. Here dis- 
cursive thought has a more subordinate role, since knowledge of 
persons is fundamentally immediate or intuitive. In the enjoy- 
ment of nature and art, in friendship and love, the ratiocinative 
factor is more fully absorbed in the intuition which it illuminates 
than in our scientific knowledge. It is in these intuitive and 
affectional experiences that we most nearly apprehend the per- 
fect character of an ideal cognition, one which penetrates with 
direct insight the entire system of the finite and takes all the 
elements and relationships of the latter up into an immediate 
grasp. 

Immanence and Transcendence 

We have arrived, by a process of cumulative inference, at the 
notion of a supreme spiritual community, superpersonal life, or 
overself, the absolute reality. We have argued that the physical, 
spatial, and temporal world involves a conservingly active ground, 
a perduring principle of order ; that the nature of truth involves 
belief in a supreme systematic thinker or mind; and finally that 
the world of persons, considered as the sole bearers of values, 
implies an ultimate good, which is the ground for the attainment 
and conservation of personality. 

The final question is this : Is the absolute ground of existence 
and value an impersonal principle that exists solely by virtue of 
its immanental activity in nature and humanity, and is it thus 
wholly exhausted and contained in its universe ; or is the supreme 
principle really an overself or spiritual community which tran- 
scends all finite selves and their world? If it be said that the 



496 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

supreme community or cosmic self must transcend the world, in 
the sense of being outside it in space and before it in time, I reply 
that the conception of a universe as a world beginning in time and 
created by an external first cause, which initiated its creative 
activity at a specific moment in time, is a contradiction. One 
would have to suppose a cause, why the first cause began to act 
at the particular moment when creation began. Then the first 
cause is no longer a first cause, and we are launched out again on 
the endless regress of an infinite series of temporal events. If it 
be said that this difficulty can be avoided, by the assumption that 
time was created with the world, I reply that the statement that 
time had a beginning is self-contradictory, since a beginning 
implies a time before that beginning ; but a beginning in time is 
no beginning and therefore time can have no absolute beginning. 
A beginning of beginnings is the beginning of nonsense. 

Moreover, the conception of a cause spatially external to that 
which it causes or creates, as something outside itself in space, 
involves us in all the difficulties with regard to the passage of the 
cause into the effect ; in short, in all the difficulties which we have 
discussed in dealing with the notion of discrete entities in wholly 
external relations. The notion that the universe came into being 
at a point in time by the temporal act of an extra-mundane cause 
is thus untenable. Creation must be the endless expression of 
God's eternal activity and, hence, an eternal process. The world 
cannot be spatially outside God, nor God outside the world. But 
it does not follow that His character is wholly exhausted by His 
continuous expression in the world. In rich and perfect self- 
completeness He must transcend the world as it is at any moment. 
He cannot be less, and He must be much more, a self than any 
finite self. He must transcend in insight, in wealth of content 
and harmony, and in the ceaseless self-activity, of His will, all 
other selves. The difficulties in regard to transcendence and im- 
mance arise, it seems to me, largely from taking these terms in a 
physical or material sense. When we say that God transcends the 
world, what we properly mean is, not that He is outside of it, but 
that, in the quality of His character or nature, in His wealth of 
content and harmony of inner spiritual being and action, He 
transcends in worth or value all finite selves. He is the absolute 
center of values. 

I admit the great difficulty in conceiving how a conscious 



FINITE SELVES AND OVER-SELF 497 

community of being can be uniquely self-conscious, and yet be 
the unitary ground of a world of particular things and finite per- 
sons. Still we do have inklings of how this may be so. Even a 
great representative human individual, such as an Abraham 
Lincoln, may, with all his unique and private selfhood, be in a 
genuine sense the source and unifier of a nation's will. A Jesus 
may be solitary and transcendent in his inner life amidst the 
crowd and even amongst his beloved disciples, and yet be the 
unifying will of their wills, spirit of their spirits. And the human 
spiritual hero fulfills this function just in proportion to the 
measure in which he incarnates the universal cosmical will. Of 
course there is a fundamental difference between any finite indi- 
vidual, as dependent on the supreme will, and that will. But the 
difference must be one of degree. Finite selves must be the in- 
finitely varied manifestations in time of the universal self. There 
must be identity of spirit amidst all the varied forms and degrees 
of its manifestations. The overself must indeed be self of our- 
selves. Spirit is enriched, not impoverished, by self-impartation. 
It lives and grows by giving and spending. 

I do not say, then, that the belief in the transcendency or over- 
selfhood of the cosmical community has the intellectual cogency 
that I attach to the belief in a dynamic and rational principle of 
unity. I say only that, if the intrinsic values of persons are really 
values, persons are the most significantly worthful realities in the 
world. If there be no personal or superpersonal ground for their 
lives, the meaning and goal of nature's evolution and humanity's 
ceaseless travail seems to turn to nothingness. Therefore faith in 
the spiritual character or selfhood of the supreme unity is involved 
in the recognition that personal values are the finest fruits of 
the process of reality. Such faith is rational, since without it the 
whole process of reality, with all its striving and suffering, all its 
passion and vision, all its achievements and heroisms, turns to 
dust and ashes. 

Perhaps the greatest obstacle in the way of conceiving the 
union of transcendence and immanence in the Godhead is the 
spatial imagery which clutters our thought — immanent is taken to 
be "residing spatially inside" ; transcendent to be "living spatially 
above or outside of." I do not say that we can expect to free our- 
selves completely from these associations, nor that we should ignore 
the question of God's relation to the space-order. If "the earth 



498 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

is the Lord's and the fullness thereof," if "the heavens are his 
dwelling place," then space is neither a limitation of His spirit 
nor a distortion of His glory. But I suggest that, if spirit be 
trans-spatial and capable of direct communion with other spirit, 
the problem becomes somewhat less insoluble. May we not say 
that in the whole physical order God is immanent in the sense that 
the whole continuing system of physical and vital energies consti- 
tute the continuous expression of His creative energizing will, 
but is not identical with his will; whereas he is "closer to us 
than breathing and nearer than hands and feet" because, while 
we are distinct spiritual existents, we are spiritually of the same 
nature with Him? As persons we are existentially distmct and 
inferior, but essentially identical with the Divine. We can com- 
mune with Him as with our fellowmen, by virtue of community 
of nature ; in fact in spiritual communion with our fellows we do 
essentially commune with Him. 

The permanent value of the doctrine of the Trinity seems 
to me to lie in its attempt to express the fact that God is a perfect 
spiritual community, a superpersonality. God the Father is the 
eternal creative ground of all reality : God the Son is the eternal 
self-impartation or self-manifestation of the eternal ground in the 
eternally creative world-process: God the Holy Spirit is the 
eternal process of union or communion, by which the eternal 
ground is felt and recognized to be forever energizing in the world- 
process and, especially, in the historic life of humanity ; by which, 
in brief, the Son in His fullest being as the Divine in humanity 
is felt to be in union with the Father of all. Thus, through the 
doctrine that God is a spiritual community, higher than and yet 
verily or in essence present in the human world, justice is done to 
the social nature of spirit and to the doctrines of immanence and 
transcendence, which otherwise are incompatibles. Only a spirit 
or personality, at its highest, can be at once immanent and tran- 
scendent ; can at once live and know and love in and through other 
spirits and, at the same time, by virtue of the fact that it is a 
spiritual center or unity, can transcend the other lives in and 
through which it lives and knows and loves. Through the inter- 
play of personal spirits, living, moving and having their being in 
one another's being and thus, through that deepening communal 
life, attaining their own fullness of being, are we furnished with 
an adequate clew to the tangled facts of experience, ©nly thus 



FINITE SELVES AND OVER-SELF 499 

do we get hints as to how this seemingly disordered world of ours 
may be the expression of an eternally perfect order of existence 
which is, at the same time, the eternal order of personal value. 
Through the discovery of, the contemplation of, and the com- 
munion with this order alone, is the fretful stir unprofitable and 
the fever of this jarring world laid at rest. Thus do our noisy 
years become moments in the being of the eternal silence, where 
alone there is peace and joy and power for the human spirit to 
live out its length of days in the light of the eternal. 

I have hitherto employed the terms — "overself," "supreme 
spirit," and "supreme spiritual community" — to designate the 
supreme reality. I have done so advisedly. Whether one shall call 
the supreme being a personality or an individual will depend on 
one's conception of these terms. Those who, like Dr. Bosanquet, 
regard a person as a finite self existing only in social relations, call 
their absolute the one perfect individual, since it is the all-inclusive 
and utterly harmonious being. This seems to me an unaccustomed 
restriction of the term individual. A finite self, and even an animal 
organism, possesses individuality. To me a person is a rational 
and social individual, and the supreme person is the perfectly 
rational and social individual or self-conscious being. The su- 
preme being is the spiritual ground of finite personality, which is 
social, and hence is the perfect personality because the perfect 
community and vice versa. I regard personality in man as always 
imperfect and subject to development ; and the supreme person as 
the ground of the development of man as a rational and social and 
spiritual individual towards fuller personality. Therefore I 
would suggest that God is the perfect personality, because He is 
the perfect community. His inmost character or nature must be 
expressed most adequately in originating and sustaining the life 
of the community of finite selves in and for whom alone values 
exist. He must be self-imparting love. 

But the supreme spirit cannot be the impersonal or unconscious 
spirit of even a perfect community. Imperfect communities have 
no effective existence and no live values, except in so far as the 
prevailing spirit of the community finds adequate realization in 
the actual consciousness of living members thereof. The imper- 
sonal spirit of the community is an abstraction. To set up such a 
ghostly entity as the supreme principle of unity and value would 
mean that there is no real unity and no real ground of values. It 



500 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

would be to ground the only worthful life in the world on a non- 
entity. The supreme reality, if it be at once the ground of the 
order of values and of all other orders, must be a self-conscious 
spirit. It must be the concrete source and goal of the lives of all 
other spirits, the perfect self which ever energizes and manifests 
itself in the world, but ever transcends in the harmonious unity 
of its interior life its finite manifestations. 

Such a conception of a concrete spiritual life at once immanent 
in the world and transcending, in the heart of its own being, the 
world, is, I take it, what the doctrine of the Trinity has aimed at. 
With the relation of any historical person to the establishment of 
this doctrine, or with his place in the Trinity, the philosopher is 
not concerned. Such questions belong to the history and inter- 
pretation of religious experience and faith. 

The metaphysical doctrine of the Trinity, although it is basic 
to the Catholic theology of Christendom, is, of course, not confined 
to the latter. It is the product of the neo-Platonic development 
of the logos doctrine. Its logical elements, in barest terms, are the 
eternal ground, the creative self -manifestation of that ground (the 
logos) and the conscious union of the creative and revealing logos 
or Son with the eternal ground or Father. Thus we find in 
Plotinus a Trinity of supreme good, intelligence or spirit and 
world Soul, and it is the central conception of the metaphysics of 
Hegel. A history of the development of the speculative doctrine 
of Trinity is much to be desired. 1 

J For a modern statement of the Christian doctrine see, John Caird, The 
Fundamental Ideas of Christianity; for a brief history, see the article, God; 
(Biblical and Christian), in Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Beligion and Ethics, 
Vol. vi. Also the books of C. C. J. Webb, God and Personality, Divine Per- 
sonality and Human Life. 



CHAPTEE XXXVII 



The universe in its totality is dynamic and alive, and probably 
value-realizing. Its meanings are fulfilled in the effectuation of 
the values that inhere in personality. We must recognize, of 
course, that the whole character of the cosmical System of Values 
is not, and cannot be, known to human beings, but this limitation 
of our insight does not nullify the probable validity of the hypothe- 
sis that the movement towards personalization is the most adequate 
description of the world meaning that can be framed by man. 

The supreme spiritual community or over-self has been pre- 
sented as the organizing and sustaining ground of values. It is 
conceived to be the ultimate self-determining Order of Life and 
Spirit, which expresses itself in the personalizing process of the 
empirical world. In "willing" (the most adequate term we have, 
although inadequate to the nature of the cosmical spirit) the lives 
of finite selves, with the whole complex of historical processes and 
individual histories involved therein, the Over-Self expresses his 
own enduring creative meaning. 

Now, a world which has a significant and worthful character 
must be a realm of growth or evolution. To assume that reality 
must be eternally perfect, that it can have no seasons and bear no 
fruits, is to assert that ultimate reality is void of all positive rela- 
tion to the process of empirical reality and to reduce the latter, 
with all its activities and values, to illusion. It is to make of this 
serious, zestful and worthful drama of selfhood and community- 
life, an empty dream. 

It follows that the supreme self cannot be a timeless experi- 
ence, an eternal and motionless "now," for which all change and 
evolution are unreal phantoms created by the finite mind. I can 
find neither meaning nor worth in the conception of an absolute 

1 This chapter is the revised form of an article, ' c Time, Change and Time- 
transcendence ' ' in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific 
Methods, Vol. v, No. 21, October 8, 1908, pp. 561-570. 

501 



502 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

timeless experience, in which all temporal and relative experiences 
and deeds are absorbed into a motionless eternal "Now," a "Nunc 
Stans/' Such an absolute would be out of all intelligible relation 
to our actual experiences, and without any definable value for the 
interpretation of our lives. 

Since either our temporal world is real, or actual experience is 
wholly illusion, we must assume that, for the ultimate ground of 
selves and values, there is real succession and growth. The 
supreme community of life must experience change and evolution, 
for it is essential to the teleological and spiritual character of 
reality that individuals shall achieve actual development. Eeality, 
as society of selves, cannot be a static and absolutely closed system. 
Within the limits set by the supreme principles of the world-order, 
there must be free movement of persons with some degree of self- 
determination. This need not be a condition imposed from with- 
out upon the universal spiritual community, since it is in this very 
world of many differing and developing individuals that the su- 
preme meaning and value wins expression. The supreme spirit 
may know, with the single and continuous synthetic grasp of his 
intuitive insight, all the determinate possibilities of growth open 
to finite selves, if he creatively wills their being, and therewith, 
the conditions of their growth. He may know the whole range of 
activities possible to all beings capable of choice. He may know 
the limits of error and evil open to every individual, since these 
limits are set by the determinate character of his world and of 
each individual in it. In short, he may know that the limits of 
"negation" in the finite realm are those of mutual implication and 
contrast in a concrete and systematic whole, not those of bare con- 
tradiction by which things are forever driven apart. 

I employ the term "negation" here in the sense of living and 
concrete difference or contrast in an actual system which coheres 
through the positive qualities and mutual implications of its mem- 
bers, so that all differences in the system are real when their mean- 
ings are developed. The world of "morality," "society," or 
"truth" is such a system. "Bare" negation, on the other hand, is 
contradiction which merely denies the presence of some reality, for 
example, "not-good, not-wise," etc. I do not think that bare nega- 
tion is ever intelligible. All significant denial involves affirmation. 
Spinoza's Omnis deierminatio est negcdio is a half-truth. The 
other half is Omnis negatio est determinatio. 



PERFECTION AND EVOLUTION 503 

Concrete examples of such individual systems of differences 
are: a family, which is and coheres through the differences or 
contrasts of husband and wife, child and parent, brother and 
sister ; a community or state, the life of which is maintained and 
enriched by the specialization of individuality and function of its 
members; the body of truth in any well-organized science, etc. 
The ultimate standard or ideal criterion of truth, morality, social 
life in all its forms, as of reality as a whole, is that of a system of 
differences or particulars, constituting by their mutual implica- 
tions a universe of individuals which itself is an individual whole 
or community. 

When Hegel speaks of the "power of the negative," I take it 
that he means that reality is a living and individual system or 
society of cohering and mutually implicatory individualities. The 
dynamic quality of negation or contrast depends on the fact that 
the evolution of reality is an evolution of life, intelligence, and 
spirit. The power of the negative is that of definition or fulfill- 
ment of individuality through differentiation and the synthesis of 
differences. If reality at its highest level be "spiritual," only thus 
can development take place in it, since all spiritual development 
involves the interplay of contrast and organization in the elements 
of a totality; whether that totality be an individual organism or 
mind, a social group or a system of ideas. Only if reality were 
static, and evolution an illusion, would the power of negation be 
meaningless. 

The supreme spirit of life can only be the ordering principle 
or organizing power of a world in which there takes place, with 
every fresh achievement of selves, positive increase of value, and, 
with every fundamental failure, loss of value. How then can such 
a Community or over-self be conceived as perfect ? Well, if "per- 
fection" must exclude any activity of such a self or communal 
spirit in a world of imperfect beings, and any sympathetic relation 
to development therein, let us admit that the supreme spirit is not 
absolute and is imperfect ; but, in this case, judged by the highest 
human standards of value, such "imperfection" has more worth 
than a static and lifeless perfection. An absolute out of all positive 
relation to the world of developing reality is neither a community 
of persons nor an over-self. It is simply a motionless mechanism. 
Static perfection is death. 

Progress, in and through the deeds of a constant succession of 



504 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

individuals and generations in the continuing life of humanity, its 
societies and cultures, must constitute real values in the universe. 
Who would deny that the world was made positively richer by the 
development of the classic culture of Athens, or of the Christian 
religion, of Elizabethan literature, or the art and science of the 
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries ? In the process of spiritual 
evolution, as well as in its forerunner, vital evolution, there has 
been real growth and enrichment. So long, then, as the historical 
process keeps up must not the supreme community be imperfect 
and subject to growth? Since it participates in the historical 
evolution of finite lives and in the enrichment of values in these 
lives, must not its own life be continually enhanced thereby ? In 
regard to this difficulty I suggest the following considerations : 

1. Any sort of progress presupposes standards of estimation. 
Progress in personal or spiritual values presupposes criteria of 
value, that are not themselves subject to the change and transmuta- 
tion which they serve to evaluate. If the True and the Good, in 
the realm of finite development, gradually win greater effective- 
ness, or have definite meaning, however dimly apprehended this 
may be by finite agents, there must be ultimate standards of truth 
and goodness to which these finite achievements approximate in 
varying degrees. The ultimate values may unceasingly win ex- 
pression in a variety of finite realms, but their inherent qualitative 
character is not thereby altered. The progressive movement of 
finite spirits, in the realization of intellectual, moral, and emo- 
tional values, means that there function, in every successive stage 
and differing phase of cosmical evolution or individual develop- 
ment, permanent intrinsic values. Evolution or progress without 
direction, goal, or standard, is a meaningless contradiction in 
terms. A value that is solely relative to another value, and so on 
indefinitely, is not a true standard of value. 

2. Every significant individual life or epoch of historical 
culture must have intrinsic worth in itself, and thus be a worthful 
element in the dynamic process of reality. It cannot be a mere 
link in an endless chain of a "progress" that has no "whence" 
and no "whither." Nothing in experience has any intrinsic worth, 
unless it bears within its own bosom the power of yielding imme- 
diate values for selves. Hence, an endless succession of temporal 
stages, each contributory to a possible future value never fully 
realized, is without meaning and value. Always the living now, 






PERFECTION AND EVOLUTION 505 

must be laden with intrinsic values. The latter cannot wait to 
win perfection at some remote date, or even a dateless perfection. 
It must be ever winning perfect self-expression, although the values 
that are in the possession of any particular finite self or culture 
may seem imperfect. The True, the Good, and the Beautiful may 
seem, to any finite insight, imperfect; but the finite self's very 
judgment and feeling of imperfection involve the presence in his 
experience of the sense of perfect values, as now and ever 'valid 
and effective. He condemns his own partial deed only by the light 
of the perfect deed. 

3. Progress in individual lives, and in historical stages, in the 
attainment of higher values or the fuller possession and wider dis- 
tribution of already recognized values, does not necessarily mean 
that the ultimate self, or ideal community of persons, as the sus- 
taining and effectuating ground of values, must change or progress 
in its own "character" or "will." The ultimate ground of values 
may maintain itself continuously, as the enduring unity, through- 
out all the diversity of its historical relations. As the dynamic 
community in which all sundered and fragmentary meanings of 
empirical reality are knitted up, the over-self may fully conserve 
and express, in the wealth of its self -manifestation, all the intrinsic 
values which in the various phases of the empirical order, as taken 
in isolation from each other, seem impotent and unfulfilled. Each 
element seen by itself alone is not truly seen, and yet each may 
contribute to the perfect whole. 

The difficulties involved in thinking the relation of a temporal 
world to perfection seem to arise in part from making the quanti- 
tative view of things a final norm. An increase in the number of 
finite selves who win and enjoy the highest values is not an altera- 
tion of the intrinsic qualitative character of these values. Indi- 
viduality does not mean oddity, and the value of individuality does 
not consist in adding something that the universe never had before. 
The value of personal individuality consists in its own possession 
of, and direction by, universal values. 

The relation of a supreme spirit to change and history will per- 
haps be made clearer by some general considerations on the nature 
of time. 

Every idea of time, from the crudest to the most abstract, has 
its roots in the present experience. No past has actuality or mean- 
ing which is not involved in the living present. A "present" can 



506 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

not strictly be defined. It eludes the very conditions of precise 
definition, since, as soon as one takes the first step towards appre- 
hending it in thought, it has already become past. We are all sure 
of the present in which we live, as we are sure of our own identity. 
The "present" offers the same obstacles to definition that the living 
self of our immediate experience offers. In fact, the immediate 
consciousness of the present and the immediate sense of selfhood 
are the same thing, viewed from different standpoints. Ever flow- 
ing on or "becoming," the living self is the experienced interpene- 
tration of various qualitatively different phases, of a progress with 
heterogeneous aspects and a variety of stages, in which "past," 
"present," and "future" are only relatively and indefinitely dis- 
tinguishable. 

We can conceive of other beings, possessing minuter or coarser 
time-perceptions than ourselves; as having, in relation to an objec- 
tive standard of measurement, much longer or shorter "presents'* 
than we have, that is, as living in different "tempos/' 2 The living 
present, which we distinguish from past and future, but which 
actually has duration, and, hence, includes past and future in its 
own apparent instantaneity, has been called the "specious" present. 
It does not contain any sharp delimitation of before and after. It 
"becomes," but does not begin or end, and its duration is measured 
by the aid of retrospection and in spatial terms. As soon as I 
undertake to determine the content and extent of my present, the 
present to be so determined has already become past. The actual 
present is now the incipient purpose and plan of measuring the 
fleeing specious present. 

The actually experienced present, then, need contain no def- 
inite awareness of change. And yet, the present cannot be a 
motionless point or dimensionless line transverse to the direction 
of change ; for what then becomes of past and future, and how can 
we speak, even retrospectively, of the present as having concrete 
reality? If the present have not breadth, what becomes of time 
and change? In truth, in the actual present the self transcends 
discrete change or mutually external time-lapses, through the act 
of synthesis by which it grasps a succession as one order. The 
so-called timelessness of a self consists in this power of continuous 



2 C.f. J. Eoyce, The World and the Individual, "Vol. II, Lecture iii; also O. 
Liebmann, in Zur Analysis der WirMicKkeit, 4th edition. 



PERFECTION AND EVOLUTION 507 

durational synthesis. When I begin to recite a line or stanza of 
poetry there is actually present in my consciousness the feeling of 
the continuous movement of meaning of the line, or, perhaps, of 
the entire stanza, while I am actually saying a single syllable. Or 
I sit down to write a discussion which I have previously thought 
out, and, as I proceed, the argument develops out of the nascent 
synthetic feeling that I have of the discussion in its entirety. The 
actual present, then, is constituted by a progressing synthetic unity 
of self-activity involving continuity of interest and meaning. 

And the "past" is a reconstruction or revival, determined by 
the synthetic continuity of interest in the living flow of actual 
experience. A tiresome experience, such as listening to a bore, 
which seemed endless while we were undergoing it, shrinks to 
almost nothing in our recollection. An experience, unified and 
controlled by a strong emotional interest, may be devoid of imme- 
diate consciousness of succession and of all explicit reference to 
past and future, because its successive features (successive for 
retrospective analysis) are fused together or interpenetrate in one 
whole of emotional tension, "Dem Gluchlichen schlagt heine 
Stunde" In recollection, on the other hand, such an experience 
bulks large because of its unity or vital interpenetration with the 
actual present. 

The actual basis of belief in the past's reality is the living 
"now" or "duration" of experience. The past is a reconstruction 
made by a thinking self. The possibility of this reconstruction 
and, by consequence, the present reality of the past depends on the 
filiation of interest and meaning in and with the present synthetic 
movement of a self. In this time-spanning synthesis past and pres- 
ent are united, and, without it, the past would not now be recog- 
nized as having once been real. The basis of all reconstruction of 
a past period, for example, in human history, in geology, or in the 
history of the solar system, is always an inference based on an 
assumed analogy or continuity of mental, moral, or physical 
processes then and now. We begin with certain present data — 
manuscripts, social ideas, or rock strata — and we interpret these 
in terms of a continuity of process. The Periclean age, the 
Archaean epoch, the primitive star mist, are all constructed on the 
assumption of duration of process or continuity of movement — in 
the affairs of men, the formation of earth structure, the chemical 
and physical processes of the solar system. 



508 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

In the same way the future depends on the present. The 
future is the present forward-reaching. It is the incipient tension 
of developing, and as yet unsatisfied, interests, desires, meanings. 
The musical symphony, the operatic phrase, the present aching 
yearning of love, the present imperative stress of ambition, emo- 
tionally demand their own completion. For the failing old man in 
his dotage there is literally no future on this side of the grave. 
Tor him the past and present intertwine and are all, unless the 
urge of religious feeling quickens him to project himself into a 
life beyond the grave. For the young man, on the contrary, life 
is big to infinity because of his strong interests and desires. 

Our notion of time, then, is the form into which we project, 
from the living present, the continuity of our interests, aims and 
values. Psychical time is the shadow cast by the unsatisfied will of 
man along the world of cosmic becoming. It is the mark of the in- 
complete moving towards completion. And the so-called direction 
of time's flow is determined by the tensions of human interest and 
aim. Hence, the movements of history and geography appear as 
irreversible series of qualitatively individual acts and never-to-be- 
repeated events, in contrast with the reversible character of a 
purely mechanical system. The historical development of man- 
kind and of the world, as of an individual, constitute series of 
qualitatively discrete or unique occurrences. The continuity of 
any historical whole, for example, the life of a great man, the his- 
tory of England or of Christianity, is dependent on a community 
of meanings and values which interpenetrate the succession of 
events and constitute them a whole. Every real history is con- 
stituted by a spiritual synthesis. Hence the so-called absolute con- 
tinuity of time's flow is a misleading metaphor. In so far as the 
movement of reality is discrete, actual time is discrete and hetero- 
geneous. There are as many perceptual time-series as there are 
striving and developing selves. Perceptual time, as the form of 
experienced becoming, must be, so far, at least, as imperfect beings 
are concerned, coincident in extent with change. 

Since the concrete present alone is actual, and the past and 
future have reality only as factors in the living present, how can 
there be any consciousness of succession ? How can the past be in 
the present ? Some writers hold that there can be no direct sense 
of transition or succession in experience, and that the past is pres- 
ent only in the sense that now a part of the past is represented in 



PERFECTION AND EVOLUTION 509 

the present as part of the present. They hold that to suppose that 
there is transition is to become involved in the antinomies of the 
endless regress, since, if the temporal experience be a continuum, 
it must be infinitely divisible and hence can contain no actual 
"moments.' 7 And, if it be not a continuum, then between the past 
instant and the present there is a "timeless" gap which cannot be 
bridged over. But it is admitted that there are in the present 
vague 'pointings backwards and forwards. Are not these pointings 
just what is meant by the sense of durational transition ? I find 
in introspection that the past and the future, as factors in the 
present, mean for me sometimes feelings of transition, I find also 
that I have experiences without feelings of transition, and in which 
the past is present simply by way of representation as my present 
memory of the past. But I do not think that a static representation 
now of a past could really mean a past for me, unless I have been 
conscious of transitions in my own experience. Both the sense of 
transition and the power of representation of a past experience are 
factors in the consciousness of time. Temporal experience is not 
a homogeneous continuum like pure space, but it does involve con- 
tinuity of meaning and purposive experience. The consciousness 
of continuity in a succession of discrete moments, on which the 
cognition of change and development depend, would be impossible 
without the continuity of the self through change. The partial 
identity of the past with the present, by which alone a distinction 
and a relation can be recognized in successive experiences, involves 
the identity of the self which knows change without and within 
itself. The permanence of a self is involved in the consciousness 
of time and change, and, in turn, the recognition of time is in- 
volved in the consciousness of the self as continuous or self-iden- 
tical through change. "Only the permanent changes" and "only 
the changing is permanent" may seem paradoxes, when set side 
by side. Nevertheless, these propositions, taken together, state the 
fundamental conditions of all intelligible experience; and their 
roots are in the self, which is continuous or endures in change. 
Perceptual time is adjectival. Our actual perceptions have a 
temporal aspect, but we do not perceive time-in-itself or physical 
time. Whatever reality time seems to have, over and above the 
direct consciousness of transition in becoming, is due to its identi- 
fication with a common measure of change. Time gets pictured as 
the container, of which change in orderly succession is the content, 



510 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

that is, as a flowing matrix of change. In perceiving and placing 
events in the time-order, the self projects and sees in perspective, 
from the "now" of immediate experience, its remembered experi- 
ences of change, by generalizing the direction and the rise and fall 
in tension of its own strivings and satisfactions and ordering them 
in a quasi-spatial "form" or vessel. 

The "form," "concept," or "notion" of measurable time is, like 
that of space, from which, indeed, it is taken, an empty homo- 
geneity of movement. "Pure" time is figured as an indefinitely 
moving point describing a continuous straight line, or as a circular 
movement or as an unceasing rhythm. 3 The "change" of actual 
experience, on the other hand, is the becoming or development of 
qualitative differences in experiences, of a manifold variety of 
tendencies that are organically related in manifold ways in the syn- 
thesizing movement of a self's life. Every "now" is a discrete 
moment or finite element in a process of becoming, whose unity 
consists in the synthetic interpenetration of these discrete moments. 
We reflectively think our successive experiences as bound together 
by the persisting continuity or systematic interrelations of our 
interests, purposes, and meanings, and the time of these experi- 
ences is synoptically conceived as an abstract "form" constituting 
one continuous whole. 

In this synoptic, synthetic activity the self transcends its 
momentary existential states. Here it reaches beyond the contents 
of its immediate experience. And, by reflection on this transcend- 
ence of the given and the changing, through which transcendence 
the changing gets ordered and dated, the self discovers that it can 
go on indefinitely adding together section after section of formal 
times, that it can indefinitely conceive finite fleeting "nows" as 
strung together; it can, indefinitely, proceed with the process of 
analysis or discretion and of synthesis. So arises the ordinary 
notion of "infinite" time. This is but an abstract image (com- 
monly visual-motor in origin) of the self's consciousness of logical 
infinity. In the case of time, as of space, the real infinity involved 
is that of the analytic-synthetic activity of thinking. The time of 
actual experience is always finite. Infinite Time is the abstract 
representation of the mind's power of conceptual analysis and 
synthesis of change-experiences. By virtue of this synoptic func- 

*Cf. Chap. 18, Space and Time. 



PERFECTION AND EVOLUTION 511 

tion the mind transcends the finite discreteness of actual succes- 
sion and conceives abstract time-series. The true infinite in this 
regard is a time-spanning function of the thinking self. So-called 
infinite time has no independent reality. And actual finite time 
is the form of experiences of change. 

We can frame no positive notion of a conscious self for which 
change and succession are unreal. On the other hand, the self 
maintains a consciousness of its own continuous identity in the 
midst of change. The consciousness of identity is just as integral 
to experience as the consciousness of change. Moreover, there rise 
above the surface of the stream of personally experienced becom- 
ing certain uniquely significant, emotional and intellectual experi- 
ences, in which seems to inhere the quality of time-transcending 
worth or value. In these the self seems to find permanence in the 
midst of change. 

The continuous identity of the self is marked by striving, feel- 
ing and purpose. The self loves and aspires, hopes and plans, etc. ; 
and is aware of its own relative continuity of aim, in the growing 
consciousness of its persisting interests, in the increasing harmony 
of these interests, attained through the systematic organization 
and fulfillment of ends. 

The more completely the self is able to harmonize its quali- 
tatively various interests, and to establish a persistent and develop- 
ing system of ends, the more fully does it seem to achieve and 
enter upon a life of continuous activity and inward permanence in 
"becoming"; in other words, upon a life in which change means 
the growing enhancement of personal values,, a life in which the 
past is conserved by fusion with the present and the present grows 
by interpenetration with the past. Through this unity of synthesis 
mere blind change is transcended. The permanence of the self is 
constituted by the persistent and growing organization of values. 
And the most abiding and self -complete experiences, the emotional 
experiences and intellectual insights already referred to, are con- 
stituted by the fulfillment of purposes, by the realization of in- 
trinsic values. Such are the expression in personal deed, and the 
presence in personal insight, of universal principles of worth — of 
those spiritual values represented by knowledge, righteousness, 
beauty, love. In these experiences the unity of self-consciousness 
is one of concrete inner organization, of harmonious synthesis. It 
is a reality that at once persists and progresses. In short, the life 



512 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

of the self progresses or "becomes" as a unity. Our so-called acts 
and experiences of time-transcendence are, in every sphere, due to 
the continued synthesis, by the self, of a succession and variety of 
interests, values, meanings. Our purposes are effected through 
temporal processes, that is, series of means. And the principles 
which I have called "intrinsic values" are the generalized prin- 
ciples of purposive synthesis. The time-transcending quality of 
personal values does not mean that these values have had no his- 
torical conditions in culture-life and the processes of nature. It 
means only that, to the inherent significance of these values, the 
causal conditions of their origin are irrelevant. But these values 
can be real and effective only in so far as they persist through 
change, and, by this effective persistence and cumulative expres- 
sion, give a synthetic unity of meaning and direction to the experi- 
ences and deeds of selves. 

Now, the analogy of our own two-sided experiences entitles us 
to conceive an ultimate spiritual unity of meanings and values as 
transcending change through the persisting synthetic unity of the 
principles by which it controls and sustains a significant or pur- 
posive world-movement. The synthetic continuity of the human 
self, by virtue of which, in its affirmation and fulfillment of 
intrinsic personal values, it functions as a persisting dynamic 
unity; for which the external distinctions of past, present and 
future are overcome, transcends any formal time-order. If there 
be a systematic whole of world-meanings (truth, goodness, love and 
beauty) to which our human ideals or principles of intrinsic valua- 
tion stand in some positive relation ; then, by analogy, we can con- 
ceive change-transcendence that is not negative timelessness. 
These absolute values would be, by hypothesis, the ultimate con- 
ditions for the progressive fruition of conscious life in finite indi- 
viduals. The only admissible form of time-transcendence would 
be that of a system of intrinsic values, an effective and controlling 
unity of cosmic meanings, that did not originate at any definite 
point in the actual series of cosmical changes and that maintain 
and, perhaps, increasingly manifest, themselves through series of 
changes. 

Time-transcendence, then, would mean, not the negation of 
change, but the persistence, through change, of an organized unity 
of ends that preserves the effective continuity of its purposes 
throughout the (from any finite point of view) endless succession 



PERFECTION AND EVOLUTION 513 

of events. From this point of view we may at least partially 
understand how change may really take place, and yet be sub- 
ordinated to a unity of changeless or continuously effective mean- 
ings or worths which would so control the universe of change. Our 
own purposes are but partially fulfilled, and, indeed, but partially 
understood by us. Nevertheless, in so far as purpose is continu- 
ously fulfilled, the life of mere change is being transmuted into 
one of enduring meaning and value. One may conceive a trans- 
temporal knower or self as embracing many simultaneous and 
successive series of changes in the unity of his conscious activity, 
in so far as he grasps and maintains continuously the inner rela- 
tionships which bind together these parallel or successive serial 
changes; his spirit might be permanently valid in the meanings 
which he enabled to be realized in a universe of selves, thus con- 
stituting their changing lives the instruments and embodiments of 
permanent values. 

The persistence or continuity of an organic whole of intrinsic 
principles of value, which insures that, in the march of actual 
events and the alterations of finite individuals, spiritual values are 
realized, is all that can be meant by a timeless spirit or self, as 
conserver of intrinsic values. Such a spirit could not be timeless, 
in the sense of negating the temporal order ; nor unchangeable, in 
the sense of having no positive relation to change. He could tran- 
scend all time-series only in the sense of comprehending, in a con- 
tinuous organic unity or synthesis of relationships, their meanings. 
He could transcend change only in the sense of maintaining a con- 
tinuous identity of aim throughout change, and in making the 
ceaseless succession of cosmical changes subservient to a systematic 
totality of meanings and values. If there be an organic whole of 
rational meanings and spiritual values which sustains the entire 
cosmic system of lives, and which, consequently, is the ground of 
the harmony between the values or meanings of finite psychical 
centers, this ultimate organization of meanings is the cosmic 
spiritual principle or oversell 

In brief, the present alone is immediately and primarily real. 
The past has reality only as a function of the present. The future 
is real only as the dynamic pointing forward of the present. But 
the real present is a living and changing whole. It has bulk and 
duration. It is the active unity of a whole of concrete and varied 
elements. The presents of finite experients vary in bulk, com- 



514 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

plexity and duration. All finite presents must be conditioned 
elements in the cosmical present, the unity of the living synthetic 
"now" of the supreme experient. The ultimate present may be 
the concrete self-contained whole of self -activity, on which all finite 
and partial presents depend. It may be the continuous synthetic 
process, the completely interpenetrating unity in which the past 
of the universe lives as a function of the present, and which, by 
virtue of its continuous activity, becomes the future. The supreme 
self's experience would thus be the immanent unity of the world- 
present. Change would take place in the supreme self's world, and 
the unity of direction and meaning in change would presuppose the 
synthetic or synoptic activity of his individuating thought. His 
centralizing or unifying experience would be the unifying prin- 
ciple of all times and seasons. Cosmical time would be a function 
of his self-active experience. 

In place of a dimensionless "eternal' ' now, the bare negation 
of all process, I would put the conception of the concrete, indi- 
viduated, time-spanning now, which has self-movement, duration, 
and volume. As the synthetic and continuous whole, which grasps 
all finite changes in the oneness of his own individual and active 
intuition, the supreme spirit would thus transcend time, but he 
would not be timeless. He is conceived as not in time, as though 
time were an independent entity in which his activity begins, 
changes or ends. Time is in him, since it is the form of his con- 
tinuous self-activity. His "now" transcends our "nows" but in it, 
too, there is variety, breadth, depth, and complexity of texture and 
internal self-development. The "presents" of all finite selves 
depend upon the unity of the supreme self's present. All succes- 
sion and change are either internal to or dependent upon the unity 
of his will and insight. Actual time is a function of experience. 
Ultimately change and succession must be functions of the supreme 
self's activity. They cannot be forces or entities which exist inde- 
pendent of or outside of his self-directing life. The changes which 
take place in finite selves, and the changes in the physical order, 
are not independent of him, since, in sustaining this order of a 
community of persons and dts values, he wills all the possibilities 
of change in this order. Change and development then must be 
positively included in his life. He does not change in the sense of 
being impelled from without by utterly alien forces, but change 
and evolution must be constituent elements in his all-inclusive 



PERFECTION AND EVOLUTION 515 

experience. There must be succession in him. His present must 
be a concrete totality which is the ground of all finite presents ; an 
internally coherent organization which comprehends, in a vast span 
of attentive or active experience, not only all partial presents, but 
as well all of the past that is efficiently actual in the present. For, 
I repeat, there is no reality in past or future except in the actuality, 
that is, the activity and meaning, of factors in the concrete living 
and developing present. Since our presents are, not static lines 
without breadth, but dynamic and complex spans of experience, so 
God's present cannot be a static and dimensionless "timeless" 
instant. 

If it be said that to admit change into the heart of ultimate 
reality is self-contradictory, I reply that the whole force of this 
criticism comes from assuming, to begin with, that absoluteness 
and perfection mean changelessness and timelessness. I am unable 
to think a changeless universe except as a dead universe. I am 
unable to think the ultimate source, and ground, of a living uni- 
verse as not including change. There is no contradiction in the 
notion of a whole which includes real and significant change. 
Such a whole must be an organized and dynamic totality. And 
the principle of unity of the whole must apprehend change, must 
itself participate in change. 

It has frequently been argued that, inasmuch as the finite self 
rises above the immediate present in its consciousness of past and 
future, in thus being able to survey the course of temporal succes- 
sion, it transcends time. But this time-transcendence is purely 
formal or logical. It fails to deliver the self from existence in time 
and change. The self, which is thus conscious of "before" and 
"after," thinks such moments as involved in the incompleteness, 
raggedness, and transitional character, of its present duration. 
It has, as I have already said, the power of continuously synthe- 
sizing successive moments, but this synthesis always grows out of a 
concrete present which has finite duration. Such formal timeless- 
ness means only that the self is a conscious unity which endures 
through some changes. Time is, for the individual self, a function 
of experience. The self both changes and knows change through 
its own mental duration. Time is a function of selves, but of 
things that are not selves as well. 

Various attempts are found in the history of speculative 
thought, to conceive eternity as a timeless instant, an eternal "now" 



516 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

or Nunc Stems, or as a single instantaneous totality of insight 
{Totum Simul), in which all past, present and future events of the 
finite are eternally seen together. 4 All such attempts are merely 
essays at defining the inconceivable by purely negative and empty 
concepts. An eternal now, a timeless instant, are simply not nows 
or instants that we human beings can give any content to at all. 
Mr. Koyce attempts to give concrete meaning to the totum simul 
by argument from the analogy of a composer or player who grasps 
in an instant the totality of a symphony or a reciter of poetry 
to whom the whole poem is in mind in a single instant. But the 
composer, player, or reciter does not grasp the symphony or poem 
as a completely played symphony or recited poem at any instant. 
It takes time or succession for the event wholly to eventuate. As 
he proceeds with his composition or recital he is simply conscious 
of the continuity of the meaning and phrasing in a succession of 
concrete nows. 

It is only in the persistence and progress of persons and in the 
perduration of their values that we find a genuine clew to an ulti- 
mate principle of permanence in change. 5 

The one eternal order has a temporal quality, but it is not in 
time. Time is not a whole which contains it, for time does not 
exist as such ; it is an adjectival aspect of the ever-energizing self- 
active ground of the order of selves and values. Eternity belongs 
to the unvarying self-activity of the supreme spirit. All life, from 
the lowest to the highest, from sense to spirit, is rhythmical. In 
nutrition, respiration, pulsation, reproduction, thought, feeling, in 
the whole individual's history and in the history of humanity, life 
moves in rhythms. May we not suppose that the very essence of 
time is rhythmical order and that cosmical time is the eternal 
rhythm of the supreme spirit and life ? 

4 The latest, most interesting and ingenious of these is Boyee's in The 
World and the Individual, Volume II, Lecture iii, "The Temporal and the 
Eternal." 

6 James Ward, in his 'Realm of Ends, calls this Axiological Eternity. I 
prefer to call it Axiological Permanence or Perduration. 



CHAPTEK XXXVIII 

OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 

How can the hypothesis of a supreme spirit of good be squared 
with all the brutal accidents, insensate stupidities, fiendish cruel- 
ties, unmerited sufferings, and insolently triumphant evil in the 
world ? If we conceive the cosmic ground to be a superpersonal 
spiritual community, must we not admit that it is hindered and 
thwarted in the promotion and maintenance of good by a cosmic 
principle of disorder or evil. We seem to be confronted here with 
a dilemma — either the supreme spiritual order is limited in power 
and scope or it is not good in the highest human sense, since it 
tolerates evils which the best human wills would abolish, if they 
could. 

I. Natural Evil 

In discussing our problem it is necessary to distinguish between 
natural evils,, such as bodily pain, disease, death, and natural 
catastrophes, and moral evils which are assumed to be the outcome 
of man's deliberate volitions. In the final analysis, all moral 
evils will perhaps turn out to be the results of human ignorance, 
folly, and weakness, by which men are led into greater evils that 
they know not of, because of their efforts to avoid bearing the 
evils that they know of. But it will conduce to clearness to dis- 
cuss first the nature and uses of natural evils without specific 
reference to moral evils. 

The most obvious forms of natural evil are pain, disease, de- 
formity, or physical and mental defects due to the operation of 
natural causes. By natural evil, as due to the operation of natural 
nonvoluntary causes, I mean those which, so far as we know, could 
no^ be avoided by human foresight and good will; for example, 
if two parents have led clean lives and prepared themselves as 
fully as possible for parenthood and yet produce a child which 
is physically or mentally defective, that is a case of natural evil. 

517 



518 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

The individual who inherits grave defects, or who suffers from 
the incidence of uncontrollable physical causes is the subject of 
natural evil. 

The indictment of the order of nature for its cruelties or its 
blind stupidies, as the case may be, has never been drawn in 
stronger terms than by John Stuart Mill. 1 Since Mill's day the 
spread of the evolutionary conception of the living world as the 
theater of the unceasing struggle for existence, the scene of endless 
and bitter warfare among sentient beings, and of the ceaseless 
warfare between sentient beings on the one hand and the blind 
course of insentient nature, has deepened and extended our sense 
of the suffering and tragedy in the world of life. This sense of 
the magnitude of suffering has been enhanced by the daily advices 
we get of diseases and catastrophes in the human world. 

The pessimist argues that there is more pain than pleasure, 
more disease than health, more deformity than normality, in 
human life and in the order of nature taken as a whole. There- 
fore, he argues, on the whole, the world order is bad; or at best, 
it is not nearly so good as, he can conceive, it might have been. 
It were better not to have been born at all. Schopenhauer, the 
most brilliant modern exponent of this form of pessimism, which 
is the basis of the religion of Gotama Buddha, argues that will 
is the essence of individuality; and endless, or never-to-be-satisfied, 
striving is the essence of will. Hence, by its very nature, will is 
forever doomed to defeat, and individuality foredoomed through 
all eternity to misery. The only way of escaping from the endless 
miseries is the extinction of individuality, by the cessation of 
desire. Schopenhauer says: "All living is striving, all striving is 
suffering, therefore all living is suffering." 

The upshot of this form of pessimism is that life is not worth 
living, and that those who persist in living and procreating more 
of their kind to suffer the same miseries or perhaps greater miser- 
ies than themselves, are fools— are, in short, the blind tools of 
blind instinct which cheats man with a mirage. Human life is 
the endless pursuit of will-o'-the-wisps, or phantoms. The will-to- 
live is engaged in a sisyphian task to survive. It were better that 
the human race had never come into being. Since it is in being 
the next best thing is that it should cease to be as speedily as 

*See the Three Essays on Beligion. 



OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 519 

possible, that human beings should cease procreating their kind. 
Since the animals live by blind instinct, they cannot escape from 
the wheel of endless birth and rebirth. But man, since he has 
the power of reflection, may free himself from the thraldom of 
the blind will-to-live. Schopenhauer says that the recognition, in 
Buddhism and Catholic Christianity, of the superior virtues of 
the celibate life is really an indirect recognition of the principle 
that the existence of individuals is the root of evil. 

This form of pessimism may be called hedonistic or eudcemon- 
istic pessimism according as it assumes that the unrealizable good 
is the surplusage of pleasure over pain or of happiness over 
misery. 

We must distinguish between two ideas of psychical good or 
value: (1) The idea that the good consists in the greatest possible 
surplusage of pleasurable over painful feeling, regardless of the 
qualitative character or organic wholeness of personal feeling. 
This is pure Hedonism. (2) The idea that the good consists in 
a more or less continuous and growing organic harmony of feeling 
or happiness. The latter I define as the relatively permanent 
quality of feeling which accompanies the realization of person- 
ality. Happiness is the affective index of personal good ; if there 
be more misery than happiness in the universe then the good is 
defeated in the long run; if the amount of happiness be increas- 
ing then the good is winning out; if the amount of happiness be 
decreasing steadily then the world is going from bad to worse. 

Whether there be more pleasure or pain in the world is insus- 
ceptible of proof. 2 By the nature of the case, it would be im- 
possible to sum up pains and pleasures and to strike a balance 
between them. With respect to the animal world, we are certainly 
not in position to assume a preponderance of suffering over satis- 
faction. The minds of animals are probably not laden with pain- 
ful memories or dread anticipations. Enjoyment of the present 
is much more characteristic of animals than the fear of the future. 
Their much less highly organized nervous systems would seem to 
indicate that they enjoy satisfaction and suffer pain much less 
intensely than human beings. With respect to human life, it is 



2 E. von Hartmann said that this is the best of all possible worlds and 
everything in it is a necessary evil. Eedemption consists in a return of the 
world to unconsciousness (Philosophy of the Unconscious). 



520 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

impossible to add together the various satisfactions and dissatis- 
factions of individual life and to strike an arithmetical balance 
between them. Even more impossible is it to balance up the 
diverse and multitudinous satisfactions and dissatisfactions of 
the human race. In spite of the constant imminence of suffering 
in human life and its frequent incidence, most people do seem to 
get many solid satisfactions from life. Granted that many in- 
dividuals may seem, to those looking at their lives from without 
or even to themselves in pensive moments, not to get much happi- 
ness from life, it does not follow that most people find life worth- 
less. Even those who suffer much are often not pessimists; in 
spite of pain they may have enduring satisfactions. It is not 
true that all life is illusory striving. In the purest personal re- 
lationships, and in the contemplation of nature, of beauty, and of 
truth, we do not strive. Still less is it true that all striving is 
suffering. There is satisfaction in successful activity, there is 
satisfaction in goalless activity, there is enjoyment of activity for 
its own sake, and there is enjoyment in the contemplation of 
progress, in the realization of purposes, in the formation of new 
purposes as well as in present attainment. 

If pleasure be not the highest good, life would not be worth- 
less even if there be not in it more pleasure than pain. But life 
is more evil than good, if its enduring purposes are not satisfied, 
if its highest values are not realized; if happiness, in our sense, 
be not, on the whole, attainable. Since the highest measure of 
value is the realization of personality in harmony with the uni- 
verse, if the order of the universe be not in harmony with the 
realization of personality the universe is not a good order. I 
cannot accept, as optimistic, the position of those idealists who 
say that it makes no difference what becomes of persons, or even 
whether they are happy while they exist; provided that, in some 
mysterious and inconceivable fashion values are conserved. I 
grant that they are heroic pessimists and I admire their high 
courage, but I think they darken counsel. If persons go to wrack 
and ruin this world is bad as a whole, although there is good in it. 

It does not seem possible to conceive a world order in which 
selves should develop into personalities without admitting the real 
possibility, and actual incidence, of pain, struggle, and failure. 
The cravings of unsatisfied desire, even the sufferings which 
come from disease and the blind indifference of the physical forces 



OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 521 

of nature to human weal, are stimuli through which man, in grap- 
pling with his environment and in some measure mastering it, 
organizes and refines his own elemental impulses and thus develops 
his personality. In order to adjust himself to the external con- 
ditions of his existence, man must reorganize his own inborn 
nature. In subduing external nature he acquires dominion over 
himself. He enriches and harmonizes the raw materials of his 
own selfhood. Without hunger, sex love, parental feeling, gre- 
gariousness, acquisitiveness, self-feeling, constructiveness, and all 
the other instincts which clamor within his bosom for self-satis- 
faction, man would neither subdue nature nor become a person- 
ality. His primal appetites lead him to industry, industry to 
science and leisure, science and leisure to greater industrial con- 
trol of nature, and to the growth and satisfaction of the finer aims 
of art, literature, science, and social life. His desires impel him 
to create the family and the community, and to recreate them 
again and again as the conditions change. His struggles against 
disease and the hostile forces of land and sea and air develop his 
powers of thought, action, and social cooperation. Our common 
destiny, even though arduous almost beyond endurance, evokes 
fellowship, friendship and love stronger than death. Man is thus 
able to wrest victory from apparent defeat, to subdue the powers 
which seem to be arrayed against him. In this struggle he grows 
in spiritual stature and can, even in the worse junctures, conquer 
; by the heroism and faith with which he faces apparent defeat. 

Thus desire and want, pain and craving, are not necessarily 
evil. They are the conditions of the emergence and energizing 
of intelligent purpose. They keep body and mind in action; ex- 
perience is enlarged, knowledge is organized, purposes are ma- 
tured, and personality becomes actual. The savage has fewer 
wants, less pain, and duller joys than the highly civilized man. 
Culture enhances the sensitiveness to suffering and to joy. Would 
anyone exchange for the life of a cultivated man that of an Aus- 
tralian bushman? 

But human instincts and appetites, human emotions and ca- 
pacities, are often found present in the natural man in such dis- 
proportionate intensities that moral evil ensues and we shall now 
consider this aspect of the problem of evil. 



522 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

II. Moral Evil 

Moral evil is the outcome of man's unsocial sociableness 
(Kant's phrase). In other words all moral evil arises from the 
social interactions of individuals. Consider an individual liv- 
ing entirely by himself ! He would suffer natural pains and enjoy 
the natural pleasures of hunger, satisfaction, heat, cold, and of 
the seven ages of his life ; but of duty, obligation, fear of punish- 
ment, desire for approbation, guilt or sin, he would have no con- 
sciousness. 3 The natural impulses and desires of man are not 
evil in effect. They all have biological values. They are morally 
indifferent tendencies of the self, which may be turned to bad or 
good account, according to the special circumstances of each case. 
The native instincts and impulses become actually good and evil 
only when their expression in the individual bears on his relations 
to his fellows. Indeed the natural impulses have a positive moral 
significance, since their expression is the condition of the existence 
of society and of the socialized individual. Without the sex im- 
pulse and the parental instinct there would be no family. With- 
out gregariousness there would be no larger community. Without 
positive self-feeling, rivalry, possessiveness, the creative impulse, 
there would be no social progress, and no individual development. 
Even pugnacity and fear have social uses. Moral evil arises 
when the satisfaction of a specific impulse or desire, in the given 
social circumstances, conflicts either with the well-being of other 
members of the social group or with the permanent good of the 
individual considered as a member of the social group. In other 
words, moral evil arises when the individual shirks the effort of 
resisting imperious impulses, the satisfaction of which, in the par- 
ticular situation and manner, is incompatible with social harmony 
and progress, or with the organization of his own selfhood; or 
when he shirks the effort of acting in such a way as to promote 
the harmony and progress of the community or his own higher 
selfhood. Thus moral evil arises from the clash of imperious 
impulses and of the inertia of the sentient selfhood, with the 
social and rational principles of conduct. In every case, moral 
evil is isolating and disintegrating; moral good is harmonizing, 
integrating, organizing in effect. Of course, much moral evil is 

*Cf. Eoyce, The World and the Individual, Vol. II, Lecture ix, "The 
Struggle with Evil." 



OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 523 

due to the blocking and twisting, during the plastic years, of the 
individual's impulses by an evil social environment. We are 
just beginning to appreciate how plastic the child is and how po- 
tent the environment. It is extremely difficult to draw the line 
between individual and social guilt. 

Thus I hold that no man chooses a continuous or complete 
whole of evil conduct with deliberation and insight into what he 
is doing. Choice of evils is confined to particulars, and evil is 
chosen not as evil, but because the individual does not realize the 
effects of the satisfaction of the particular impulse upon the 
organized continuity of his own life and of the lives of other 
members of the community. Evil is self-destructive or anarchic 
in tendency ; consequently, for a self to choose to be wholly and 
completely evil would be for it to choose utter self-destruction. 
This appears to me a self-contradiction. If the Miltonic Satan 
say: "Evil, be thou my good," he is choosing what, from his 
standpoint, is not evil. The cult of diabolism which often appears 
even in a high civilization is the product of mental aberration and 
a symptom of social disease. It may be urged, in objection to 
our theory of the social origin and significance of moral evil, that 
an individual may do evil to himself alone; may, by some series 
of acts or of failure to act, permanently injure his own higher 
nature and thus act evilly, even though his evil acts have no social 
consequences. To this objection I reply that I cannot think, 
much less understand, the higher selfhood or personality except 
as involving membership in a spiritual community. It follows 
that, to use theological terms, sin considered as an offence against 
good is always an act of disloyalty to the ideal of the perfected 
spiritual community. 4 

On the other hand, one may sin primarily against one's own 
higher selfhood, be disloyal to one's own personality. It is pos- 
sible to exaggerate the social bearings of moral evil and to under- 
estimate its individual locus and significance. The ideal com- 
munity is one of free persons; therefore, betrayal of one's own 
spiritual individuality is social treason. The two aspects are in- 
separable. Personality is social, but a spiritual society is a com- 
munity of rationally free individuals. 

4 In this connection I beg to refer to the profoundly true interpretation 
of sin by Eoyce in The Problem of Christianity. 



524 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

The possibility of moral evil and its consequent actuality 
is involved in the very nature of finite selfhood. I cannot con- 
ceive a world which is to be a "vale of soul making" that does 
not of necessity imply the real possibility of moral evil. It is 
an indispensable condition of the development of free personality. 
In this sense it is an inevitable fact of the world order. A world 
of selves, developing into persons through the organization of 
their instinctive natures, in the light of reflective insight and 
rational choice, is a world in which moral evil must of necessity 
appear. It is then an unavoidable but mitigable feature of a 
universe in which a community of rational self-determining per- 
sons is realized. Huxley somewhere says that he would rather 
be like a perfect clock and turn out automatically unerring results 
in thought and conduct than be an erring and sinning individual. 
For my own part, I am utterly unable to understand how a uni- 
verse of perfect automata could be regarded as more perfect than 
a universe of self -determining persons. Furthermore, a universe 
of perfect automata is a scientifically impossible notion. 

Moral evil is actualized in the social-historical life of civiliza- 
tion. Subhuman nature and pure savagery, if such there ever 
was in the history of man, can know nothing of the problem and 
conflict of good and evil. The so-called opposition of the cosmic 
and the moral orders, is an opposition engendered within the 
social-historical life of human culture. 5 The evils which retard 
and thwart the realization of the good are born of the conscious 
conflicts of men with one another. The historical process of hu- 
manity is a world rife with conflict and suffering, with error 
and unreason ; a world which moves slowly and toilsomely towards 
some dimly apprehended, and in part unknown, goal. 

III. Evil and the Idea op a Peefect Being 

Our final and most difficult problem is this — assuming that 
there is a supreme and perfect order, the overself or spiritual 
community which is the sustaining principle of all human values, 
how are we to reconcile this assumption with the existence and 
distribution of evil in our world? I have defined moral evil as 
sin against the ideal of the perfect person as a member of the 

■ Cf. T. H. Huxley, Romanes Lecture, Evolution and Ethics. 



OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 525 

perfect community, and I have pointed out that moral evil is 
always a disintegrating or disorganizing factor in the life of the 
individual and of society. By consequence, the more organization 
and harmony there is in the lives of persons as members of a 
community, the more do persons approximate to the ideal. But, 
since we have already argued that the supreme value and ground 
of all lesser values must be the supreme existent, we must hold 
that the ideal of spiritual perfection is not a mere humanly en- 
gendered ideal, that the ideal of the perfect personal community 
is not a mere product of human social life, but must rather be at 
once the ground and the goal of individual and communal life, 
and therefore must be the most real reality. Our present problem, 
then, is how to reconcile the evil in the world with the reality 
of absolute perfection. 

One attempted solution of the problem, which is hinted at 
in the Timseus of Plato, further developed by the Gnostics and 
which crops out again in John Stuart Mill, Huxley, H. G. Wells, 
and many others, is that the power of God to realize the good is 
hindered by some blind irrational matter. Thus, there is an 
ultimate or metaphysical dualism between the physical and the 
moral orders, between matter and mind or spirit. God is limited 
by this blind force external to his will which hampers the realiza- 
tion of values. 

Since we have already rejected metaphysical dualism, we can- 
not accept this solution. Xo doubt the operation of blind physical 
forces and the clamancy of fleshly impulse are the immediate 
conditions of much natural and moral evil. But, on the other 
hand, the physical basis of human life, its biological groundwork, 
is not immoral. It is the raw material of the moral and indeed 
of the whole personal life, and, since moral goodness and evil 
inhere only in persons, a dualism based on the opposition of the 
moral and the physical order is no solution of our problem. Since 
man is a part of nature in the fullest sense of the word, his ethical 
and other spiritual qualities are natural qualities, offspring of the 
whole cosmic order. Indeed, it is inconceivable that an imper- 
sonal cosmos could have split itself in two, by giving birth to 
beings who can intelligently oppose, condemn, subject, and try to 
explain the parent order for having mysteriously engendered in 
them qualities or powers which are superior to the order from 
which they have sprung. Since the whole of reality is a universe, 



526 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

if God is limited and thwarted by the universe's order, he too, 
like man, must be a by-product of a blind impersonal order ; and 
his perfection, like man's imperfection and aspiration, must be 
an inexplicable and mocking delusion. Either the whole of reality 
is more perfect than any one of its finite parts and the defects 
of the parts do not mar the perfection of the whole, or man is 
the highest being in the universe and is superior to the blind and 
stupid mechanical order of which he is a miraculous by-product. 

A second form of dualism we may call personalistic, since it 
assumes a cosmic personal power of evil, the devil, Satan or 
Ahrimanes, who opposes the cosmic personal power of good, God 
or Ahuramazda. The earliest form of this ethical or personal- 
istic dualism is found in the ancient Persian Religion, from 
whence it passed into Judaism and Christianity. In its best forms 
this doctrine does not hold to an irresoluble dualism. The devil 
is to be conquered, the good is finally to triumph. But it offers 
no solution of the origin of evil, except when it boldly admits 
that the devil is the creature of God, thus making God responsible 
for Satan's doings and misdoings. The doctrine has no empirical 
evidence in its favor. If taken literally, it is open to the objection 
that it cleaves the universe into two worlds and leaves us with 
an irreconcilable dualism on our hands. The ultimate unity 
would be a nonmoral principle of fate transcending both God and 
the devil and their respective hosts. 

If one does not admit the probability either of the existence of 
a cosmical devil, or of the existence of an ultimate dualism be- 
tween the order of physical nature and the ethical order, 6 how is 
one to account for the apparently needless prodigality with which 
suffering is strewn on man's pathway by powers beyond his con- 
trol, and for the flagrant discrepancy that obtains between the 
distribution of evil and the ethical merits and demerits of men? 
Before entering upon a discussion of this question I desire to 
premise that our human categories for classifying our fellows 
on scales of moral merits and demerits are at best rather clumsy 
and wooden, and are always in danger of being warped by the 
Pharisaism which can see the mote in the other man's eye much 
more easily than the beam in one's own eye. Perhaps the sun 
shines on the good and the evil and the rain descends impartially 

6 1 say advisedly, " probability. ' ' 



OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 527 

on the fields of the just and the unjust, not because the Lord of 
sun and rain is insensible to moral considerations, but because, 
from His higher viewpoint, our hard and fast clear-cut classifi- 
cations of our fellows into sheep and goats look rather pedantic 
and insignificant. 

The synthetic purpose of the world-order, if it have a pur- 
pose at all, must be the development of persons in inner individual 
harmony and in interpersonal harmony. But such a world-pur- 
pose necessarily involves imperfection, struggle, suffering and 
conflict. There is this feature common to the rigidly mechanical 
conception of reality and to the doctrine that reality is an eternal 
absolute, that in both cases all purposive activity is illusory. The 
eternal absolute, without seasons, history, or fruits, is just as 
worthless to man, just as indifferent to the concrete and passion- 
ate significance of human life, as a blind mechanical cosmos. 

Any purposive and living world of individuals then necessarily 
involves some evil. Physical evil, I have argued, is largely due 
to man's ignorance and imperfect adjustment to his environment. 
Thus far it is partially remediable, and the effort to remedy it 
is productive of a better organization of personality and of society. 
Most moral evils, possibly all, are due to lack of a vital self -pos- 
sessing insight on the part of men as to their true interests and 
goods. That the mechanical operations of the brute forces of 
nature work great evil to man cannot be denied. The irrational 
and unjust distribution of physical catastrophes and of disease 
and suffering suggest that the cosmic will has to struggle in the 
face of hindrances which he did not set up. On the other hand, 
since we never know the final issue, it may be that the cosmic 
will has set up these hindrances as the indispensable conditions 
for the development of finite selfhood. 

Whether one holds that the cosmic will is conditioned from 
without by a blind force, or that he is self-conditioned, in that 
the development of a world of individuals can be willed by him 
in no other way, the upshot is the same — if the purpose of the 
world-order is the development of a world of individuals into full 
personality, this purpose can be accomplished only at the risks 
of physical suffering and moral evil. 

It is not conceivable that a perfect spirit, aiming at the best, 
should have called into being a multitude of sentient and intelli- 
gent beings who should be subjected to so much suffering and 



528 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

failure, if he could have done otherwise. Either the over-self did 
not call into being these selves; or he did not establish all the 
conditions under which their lives must be developed and enjoyed; 
or, if he is the author of all that is and may be, there remains 
for us an inscrutable mystery surrounding the lives of sentient 
and intelligent individuality, and the things that seem to us to 
thwart and even to wreck these lives must really in some fashion, 
unknown to us, further them. 

In any case the meaning of life is, in part, expressed and real- 
ized through the sin, error, and suffering of selves as well as 
through their goodness, knowledge, and joy. What then becomes 
of the moral and intellectual distinctions of our deeds and lives ? 
Do these collapse into the indifference center of an absolute total- 
ity, in which all distinctions of moral worth are merged and lost ? 
No! Since the error and sin of finite selves are transitional 
factors in their moral growth, these defects and failures must be 
real for the supreme experient or oversell The distinctions of 
moral value are not obliterated in the whole of reality. Evil is 
not a mere empty defect, not mere absence of good. It is, in char- 
acter, oppositional to good; just so error is not the mere absence 
of truth, nor ugliness the mere absence of beauty; they are op- 
positions. Thus, our human values involve contrast and opposi- 
tion or negation. As Hegel would say they exist in relation to 
an other. The whole spiritual life involves the dialectic process, 
the setting up of and the overcoming of opposition. (This is what 
Hegel means by the power of the negative or of contradiction.) 
But the good transcends the evil, by including and transforming 
it, just as the truth transcends error by transforming and includ- 
ing what was wrong in the erroneous judgment and as in beauty 
the same elements, which in disorder constitute ugliness, are trans- 
formed into a harmonious individuality. In error a genuine 
datum of knowledge is put in its wrong relations; the error be- 
comes truth when the datum is put in its right relations. The 
artist takes the same materials of sense that in one arrangement 
give rise to ugliness or discord and produces harmony and beauty. 
In evil action an impulse or desire is affirmed in the wrong time 
or place or too much or too little. The good is harmony, propor- 
tion or order, in the expression of impulse, and the satisfaction 
of desire. 

Thus, the reconciliation of the opposition is not achieved by 



OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 529 

canceling the distinction between the opposites, but by a conquest 
in which the positive higher qualities overcome and absorb their 
opposite. In error the individual's judgment falls short of re- 
ality ; it distorts the latter by failure to grasp the systematic rela- 
tionships of facts. In moral evil the individual will assumes an 
isolated or particular interest which conflicts with the rational 
and social character of the self as an organic whole of interests, 
an individual totality, by falling short of its full meaning. The 
principle of truth and goodness is the same — wholeness or har- 
monious individuality. Evil, thus, is irrational because it is par- 
ticularistic and isolating. It is the defect in feeling and conduct 
of some more pervasive and harmonizing quality of the universe 
of selves. Evil is negation, hut it is not bare negation. It is 
negation by the exclusive affirmation of a part against, or regard- 
less of, the whole in which it properly functions. The positive 
moral significance of the part is found in making it^into a working 
factor in the totality of individual life and social order. 

In so far as the individual lives in the light of the harmonious 
and total relationships of his own desires and values, he over- 
comes the positive defects which constitute evil, by becoming a 
cooperative member in the community of persons which is the 
goal towards which the whole creation moves. Thus he ceases 
to be an isolated bundle of impulsions and becomes an organ for 
the fulfillment of the universal values. 

We reject the notion that the doctrine of a finite God strug- 
gling against obstacles, whether personal or impersonal, to realize 
the good which he would, if he could, achieve at one blow, 
offers a satisfactory solution of the problem of evil. Such a God 
is practically useless and theoretically a contradiction. He would 
be a God who is no God, but only a somewhat bigger man. There 
would only be some difference in scale, and a difference not de- 
terminable, between his weakness in the face of the cosmic coun- 
ter-currents and the weakness of man. If man be helpless in 
the face of a hostile universe or an indifferent universe, let us 
bravely face the music and be done with childish make-beliefs 
about pragmatical gods ! If, on the other hand, we have grounds 
for the larger belief that the supreme order is an order of values, 
why should we boggle at admitting, as we must, that both physical 
evil and moral evil are contributory to the perfection of the 
whole! "Not can we evade this conclusion by arguing, as some 



530 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

pluralistic theists do, that God is not responsible for evil, since 
he endows man with free will and evil arises because, in the 
mysteriousness of his capricious freedom, man wills to do and to 
be evil. The problem is only thus evaded by pushing it behind 
us, for, if God creates man with a mysterious power of indetermi- 
nate and unmotivated choice, surely He is responsible for having 
so created him. The only sense in which I can admit human 
freedom is that the self, to a limited and varying degree, is a 
real and growing center of rational action. True freedom is self- 
determination under the guidance of rational ends. The indi- 
vidual is responsible for the use of his reason and, thus far, 
responsible for his character. Indeed, he is his character, which 
is not a physical quantum, but a developing capacity. Since finite 
selfhood involves growth, self-development through deliberation, 
choice with error, man is responsible for his deeds in so far as 
he is responsible for his own growth. But for his original na- 
ture with its limitations within and without himself, he is not 
responsible. God, then, must be the ultimate ground of the real 
possibilities which, in the definitely varying qualities and condi- 
tions of human persons, flower into good and evil acts. God or 
the cosmic spiritual order is responsible for the fact that evil 
can, and, therefore does occur. Evil is inevitable but not irre- 
mediable, in part at least. 

Why a world of conscious individuals exists to develop by con- 
flict, and to perfect themselves by way of error and suffering, is 
perhaps a fruitless question for philosophy, which must take the 
world as it finds it. According to Christianity the motive of 
creation is self -manifesting, self-imparting love, which brings 
forth finite spirits as its objects. In this world the birth of con- 
scious volition is the beginning of moral evil. Individuals de- 
velop from natural and nonmoral beings into the life of reason, 
love, and ideal values generally, through social conflict. 

In the birth of consciousness and reason, in the development 
of the social and moral life, moral evil originates as the offspring 
of the very process of reflection which brings forth culture. His- 
torically, then, evil is the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and the 
evolution of human culture is fruit of the same tree. The evo- 
lution of culture, scientific, aesthetic, and religious, is the evidence 
that the good, defined in terms of personal values, is realizing 
itself through the struggles of humanity in its historical process. 



OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 531 

Through all its blind confusion, wasteful errors, and dire evils, 
human history does, it seems to me, show the working out of 
ethical and spiritual values through the instrumentality of indi- 
vidual lives cooperating in social groups. Does this imply the 
reality of growth in the supreme self ? Such a conclusion seems 
unavoidable. The supreme self cannot live in otiose and blessed 
contemplation, apart from the world of finite struggling selves. 
It must comprehend and take up into its own life all the passion, 
struggle, and pathos of man's history. It must transcend, and 
yet work through, the elements of "negation" and "finitude" that 
pervade the dynamic and developing life of the world of historical 
selfhood. The supreme self's experience must grow with the his- 
torical progress and personal development of finite selves. The 
supreme good must be a living and growing harmony of differ- 
ences, a peace won and held through opposition, a communion that 
pervades and maintains itself through the developing lives of 
many individuals. 

In so far as moral evil is actual it seems to hinder the realiza- 
tion of ethical values, and thus to subtract from the fullness of the 
good. So speculation has been led, in the interest of the vision 
of the perfect whole, to argue that this is the best of all possible 
worlds. We can conceive worlds that, in some respects, would be 
better than this one. Whether, on the whole, these conceivable 
worlds might be better than our actual world no man can say; 
for no man can compare the actual world as a whole with other 
possible total worlds. Leibniz' pyramid of worlds, in his The- 
odicy, is a pretty fancy; but a logically vicious argument in that 
every possible world is just a partial variant, in some particu- 
lars, of the actual world. 

The only hind of world we can really think is a world like 
our actual world in its general features, with minor variations 
introduced in some of its details. All we can say is that suffer- 
ing and other forms of evil are inevitable in a living and temporal 
universe. In this sense evil in the parts is necessary to the good- 
ness of the whole; but why the evil in the parts should be so 
grotesquely distributed, and why there should be so much of it 
we do not know. It is impossible, in terms of rational insight 
alone, to harmonize the distribution of evil in the world with the 
idea that the whole is perfect, or that there is no hindrance to 
the will of an omnipotent and benevolent being. 



532 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

When absolute idealists 7 talk glibly about evil being "illusory 
appearance" or mere negation or absence of good they are indulg- 
ing in vain babblings, in a word-play which is impertinent in the 
face of intense suffering, genuine sorrow or unmerited catastrophe. 
They are guilty of the same sort of quibbling as the Christian 
Scientists. To say that evil is defect is not to explain it away, 
since a defect may be the cause of great suffering. Moreover, 
gruesome disease, physical or mental, is not mere defect ; intense 
suffering and loneliness and despair are positive states. 

When Pope sings "all partial evil universal good" he fails to 
consider the question — "good to whom ?" If the whole looks good 
to the absolute, but bad to most of the members of his world, then 
I say that on the whole the world is bad. It is small comfort to 
be told that the world is good as a whole, if one cannot enjoy the 
same outlook as the absolute. If finite selves can enjoy the good- 
ness of the whole then it is good just in so far as its members have 
this enjoyment. 

The darkest mystery enveloping the problem of evil is the 
unjust distribution of suffering. The connection between physical 
evil and moral quality often appears capricious, irrational, and 
cruel. The individual suffers for the guilt of others, or for their 
unavoidable ignorance; often for his own unavoidable ignorance. 
Careless or ignorant of individual desert, nature works out her 
nemesis of compensation through the biological and social solidar- 
ity of the race. The innocent suffer for the guilty, but to what end ? 
And nature often seems to inflict greater penalties for ignorance 
than for enlightened sinning! Vicarious suffering is a common 
fact. By virtue of the solidarity of the race, and of some mysteri- 
ous, though tardily effective, connection between moral evil and 
physical suffering, the innocent and the wise must suffer vicari- 
ously for the guilty and the ignorant. Careless of the single life, 
nature seems to care only that in the long run adjustment be 
made. In this way undoubtedly the principle of the good is 
served through the solidarity of the race. And the vicarious 
sufferings of the good no doubt, as Plato, the Hebrew Deutero- 

7 Mr. A. E. Taylor, for example, in Elements of Metaphysics, pp. 395 ff. 
This I understand does not represent Mr. Taylor's present view. Cf. Brown- 
ing's facile optimism in Abt Vogler. This is the optimism either of a healthy 
and happy human animal or of one who cheats himself with words that do not 
correspond with facts. Many theologians and philosophers have been guilty 
of the same procedure. 



OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 533 

Isaiah, and the New Testament writers have taught, are great 
redemptive factors in the spiritual life of mankind. The highest 
love is one that redeems through suffering. Nevertheless, we do 
not understand why such an apparently unjust method of moral 
development and progress should be compatible with the unique 
worth and meaning of the individual life. By these considera- 
tions of a universal connection of moral evil and suffering the 
problem is only pushed one point farther back. If one refuse to 
accept an ethical-metaphysical dualism with its unreconciled op- 
position of two warring powers of good and evil, or a chaotic 
pluralism of powers, one must assume that the relation of the 
supreme spirit to the race is not the same as his relation to the 
individual. One must assume that the spiritual development of 
the individual, through striving and suffering, is a necessary con- 
dition for the spiritual elevation of other individuals, and for the 
spiritual elevation of the race. But, surely, the individual soul 
cannot be a mere means in this spiritual process ! The suffering 
of the best must be a step in the spiritual ascent of the sufferer 
who thus reaches a higher perfection, and, in so doing, becomes 
an instrument in the upward growth of his fellows. The vicari- 
ous sufferer must be the crown of the race's progress, and, hence 
there must be for him an immortal life brought to full fruition 
under other conditions than those of earth. The most worthful 
individuality must be conserved. The possibility of the conquest 
of evil can become a reality only if the protagonists in the warfare 
for human perfection thus win immortality, and, in so doing, 
become the instruments by which their fellows may likewise win 
it. If suffering, and, especially vicarious suffering, be the means 
of victory over evil, then the victory is lost and meaningless unless 
the spirits of the victors endure. The supremely good self is 
thwarted and ofttimes defeated in the struggle unless his finite 
agents are immortal. 

In short, while the problem of evil cannot be satisfactorily 
solved, and recourse must be had to the postulates of moral faith, 
the most satisfactory view is that the process of psychical and 
spiritual evolution is a movement that can achieve its ends only 
through suffering and moral evil. If one take this view and, at 
the same time, hold an ethically monistic conception of ultimate 
reality, one must believe that suffering and evil are factors in 
the experience of the supreme spirit. 



534 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

The doctrine of a suffering and self-sacrificing God, of one 
who is eternally made perfect through his sympathy and fellow- 
ship with erring and sinning humanity, is so far from being out 
of harmony with an ethical conception of the universe, that I 
should rather maintain that it is the only doctrine of God that 
at once squares with the facts of experience and does no violence 
to the ethical consciousness of man. In no other aspect of its 
teaching does the Christian religion in its original form show 
itself truer to the deeper meanings of man's spiritual experience 
than in its bold and profound doctrine of a divine redeeming love 
that is expressed through suffering, a divine life that is made 
perfect through sacrifice, that conquers and is enriched through 
overcoming its negation. 

The goodness of a supreme self then cannot be the bare nega- 
tion of the evil that is in the world. It must be the positive self- 
expressing goodness that holds its perfection through companying 
and suffering with the evil, and thus transmuting the latter into 
an instrument or factor in a positive perfection. 

Our main business is not to save the universe, nor to help a 
limited deity in his difficulties. Our main business is to save 
ourselves by losing ourselves; by finding our true selfhood in 
subjection and loyal obedience to the order of spiritual values, 
to the all-inclusive and all-transforming ideal of perfection which 
is the most real reality. The higher life, the life of the spirit, 
consists in the individual's making himself the instrument and 
dwelling-place of spiritual integrity; "In Whose will is our 
peace," "Whose service is perfect freedom" since it is the ful- 
fillment of personality through possession of the spirit of whole- 
ness. Wherever and whenever in thought, in selfless volition, or 
in selfless affection and contemplation, we put our entire individ- 
ualities in the service of objective social and impersonal interests ; 
in the service of truth, justice, harmony, order, and progress 
towards perfection, wherever and whenever we elect to serve the 
ideal of the perfect spiritual community, we transcend evil in 
transcending our lower selfhood. It becomes a vanishing, because 
transformed, defect. Its discordances pass away in the harmony 
which we behold and become. 

We cannot so account for the evil of the world as to explain 
the beneficence of all forms and amounts of evil. We may hope 
and believe 



OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 535 

. . . that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill 

* * . * * * 

. . . That good shall fall 
At last — f ar off — at last, to all, 
And every winter change to spring. 

— Tennyson, In Memoriam, 53. 

But we cannot prove that it will be so. The most one can say is 
that it ought to be so and if the ruling principle of the universe 
be spiritual it will be so. 

We have but faith : we cannot know ; 

For knowledge is of things we see ; 

And yet we trust it comes from Thee, 
A beam in darkness let it grow. 

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all 

And faintly trust the larger hope. 

— In Memoriam, 54. 

Living will that shalt endure 
When all that seems shall suffer shock, 
Kise in the spiritual rock, 

Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure, 

That we may lift from out of dust 

A voice as unto him that hears 

A cry above the conquered years 
To one that with us works, and trust, 

With faith that comes of self-control, 

The truths that never can be proved 

Until we close with all we loved, 
And all we flow from, soul in soul. 

— In Memoriam, 130. 



CHAPTEK XXXIX 

METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 

I. The Methods and Aims of Metaphysics and Eeligion 

Metaphysics and religion are similar in motive and aim. They 
both presuppose the recognition of the incompleteness and inner 
discrepancy of the realm of actual experience, of the fragmentari- 
ness and disharmony of the actual life. Neither in the naive 
interpretations of actual experience nor in the special sciences can 
satisfaction be found for man's desire for integrity, harmony, 
completeness, and stability in the world which is the objective 
condition of his experience and his desire. In brief, the deepest 
need of man as a reflective being is for a coherent and stable 
universe, a dependable order with which he can put himself in 
harmony. Thus metaphysics and religion are alike in that they 
both seek to satisfy the human demand for a comprehensive and 
consistent world view, for a doctrine of the true meaning and 
value of human life in its relation to the world-whole. The 
religious devotee and the philosopher alike endeavor "to live 
resolutely in the Whole, the Good, the True." Essential to 
both are beliefs in regard to the nature of reality as a whole 
and in regard to the place of human values in reality. And 
the fundamental difference between ethics or systematic doc- 
trines in regard to morality on the one hand, and metaphysics 
and religion on the other hand, is that, whereas in the moral 
systems we have beliefs in regard to what are the true values 
of life, in metaphysics and religion we have doctrines as to the 
place of these true values in the total scheme of reality. I 
remark, in passing, that the idea frequently broached that the 
way to escape from the difficulties of reconciling religious 
dogmas and scientific dogmas is to make religion undogmatic 
or nondoctrinal, to turn it into a system of pure morals or even 
morals touched with emotion, is to disembowel religion. While 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 537 

admitting the significant difference between theology, the sys- 
tematic theory of religion, and religion as an actual attitude of 
mind, I must insist that a religion which involves no doctrines 
or definite beliefs in regard to the nature and meaning of reality 
as a whole is no religion for a reasonable being. If morality 
touched with emotion be a religion, that can only be because the 
emotion with which morality is touched is one of reasonable con- 
fidence in, and reverent admiration for, the order of the universe; 
and certainly such an emotional attitude cannot exist without a 
definite belief as to what really is the order of the universe. Every 
religion which has counted for anything in human life has in- 
volved quite specific beliefs as to the nature of reality as a whole, 
and, more particularly, as to man's place therein. The idea of 
God, or, in more abstract terms, of the universal and eternal 
reality, is the fundamental concept of religion. A religion which 
does not tie the soul of man up with some permanent reality be- 
yond the shows of sense is no religion. The de-natured defini- 
tions of a religion without a God-idea, which various writers 
have offered as a way out of the difficulties in squaring religion 
with materialism, do not correspond to any historical or actual 
working religion. For example, to identify religion with the 
service of unrealized and purely human values, while denying to 
these values a cosmic foundation, is a confusion of thought. 

If religion and metaphysics arise from similar motives and 
have similar objects, wherein do they differ? In the first place, 
for the philosopher they do not differ. For, since a philosopher's 
metaphysics is his rationally worked out theory of reality, his 
religious attitude must take its color from his doctrine of reality, 
just as the religion of a nonphilosophical person must take its 
color from theological dogmas which he accepts and believes. In 
the second place, the theological dogmas accepted and believed by 
the nonphilosophical religionist are traditional forms of meta- 
physics which he accepts without critical examination. The theol- 
ogy of a church, for example, consists of certain propositions in 
regard to God, man, and nature, which involve a certain attitude 
of mind and will. These propositions have been formulated in 
the past, by certain persons or groups of persons assumed to have 
been competent in ability and authority to interpret the revela- 
tions as to the ultimate nature of reality and the value and destiny 
of the soul made by divinely accredited teachers and revealers. 



538 MAN; AND THE COSMOS 

A church is a social institution established and carried on to 
propagate a specific type of conduct based on an accepted type 
of religious metaphysics. 

A man's reaction to the nature of things as a whole involves 
his own nature as a whole. It brings into play his emotional and 
will attitudes, no less than his imaginative and conceptual powers. 
A religious attitude is the response to the demand of the whole 
personality for a perfect and enduring life in which the buffeted 
and distraught individual life or group life can find repose and 
strength. "Underneath are the everlasting arms." The psychical 
complexion of religious experience and attitude varies with in- 
dividuals, groups, and epochs of culture. In all cases, however, 
the need for a religious faith goes down into the very roots of the 
personal and social life — and these roots are the feelings and 
emotions in which the self or the group assumes the supremacy 
and the permanence of their fundamental valuations of life. Be- 
cause of lack of training, inclination, or leisure, and in part too, 
because of lack of capacity, the average person does not seriously 
attempt to think out for himself a doctrine of ultimate reality and 
of values. He takes these, for the most part, second-hand. 
Through the influence of suggestion and imitation he accepts the 
dogmas of the group in which he is nurtured. If he breaks away 
from them, under strong emotional stress, he is very likely to 
accept the dogmas of some other group. In the religious attitude 
of the average person reflective thinking plays a secondary role. 
Social suggestion, imitation, the sentiment of group loyalty, are 
the most powerful factors in determining the ordinary man's 
religious attitude. The religious group and the individual, as a 
member of the group, in order that they may go forward in the 
work of realizing the highest values of life, and may find con- 
solation for the present loss of values, make a wager of faith. 
They take risks because of the interests at stake. The need for ac- 
tion, or the need for consolation, is great and urgent, and there 
is not time or inclination for an unbiased investigation in this 
most difficult and comprehensive of subjects — the problem of the 
nature of reality — so the traditional dogma is accepted. 

Thus, religious dogmas are accepted because they meet the 
urgent needs of the group or the individual; but these needs in 
turn have been molded by the influence of the group — the church. 
Now, the fact that an individual wants a certain thing is not 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 539 

sufficient evidence either that he will get it or that he ought to 
get it. But, if many individuals, and especially in a long suc- 
cession of generations, have seemed to want the same things, that 
is commonly taken as a reason for the justice of the want and the 
likelihood of its satisfaction. It is forgotten that similarity of 
wants only proves that we are all made of the same old needy 
human nature. It is a fact that the very persistence of a certain 
social type of conduct and belief creates a presumption of its cor- 
rectness. The history of theology and religion abundantly sub- 
stantiate the view that the modifications which they undergo are 
determined chiefly by the whole complex of cultural factors oper- 
ating in an epoch; and that, by reason of social and mental in- 
ertia, once a type has become established, it tends to persist ; for 
example, the juristic or substitutionary theories of the atonement 
in Saint Augustine and his successors took their color from the 
legal theories and practices of the feudal Empire engaged in 
trying to maintain itself and keep the peace amidst the welter 
of semi-barbarians which it comprehended. Such a theory simply 
could not have been originated in the Athens of Socrates and 
Plato. 

The authority of the group code of conduct and of dogmas is 
referred back to its source in a divine revealer. Moses, Jesus, 
Mohammed, are regarded in their respective religions as the media 
of specific primary revelations. The church becomes the authori- 
tative custodian, interpreter and dispenser of the primary revela- 
tions, the latter being usually enshrined in sacred oracles. The 
church has its constituted authorities for the interpretation of 
the oracles. Thus, in this, the most persistent type of religion, 
the group organization and the traditions of the group mind, play 
the principal part. The individual's spirit is subordinate to the 
group spirit. It is only as a loyal member of the group that he 
can approach the deity to gain strength or favor from him. Early 
morality is tribal custom, and early religion is tribal feeling and 
tribal ceremonial which involves tribal welfare. Organized re- 
ligion (and most of the phenomena of religion still have to do 
with organized or institutional religion) is the centralized expres- 
sion of the social bond. All public religious rites, ceremonies, and 
obligatory acts, have to do with the sense of social solidarity. The 
relationship to the divine is the culminating expression of group- 
relationship. Organized religion is thus, from the outset, the 



540 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

expression and consolidation of social values. It seems to be only 
late in the history of religion that the individualistic sense of 
private personal relationship to the divine comes into play. 1 
Even thereafter the authority of social tradition and organization 
continue to play the major role in determining the character and 
expressions of the religious life. Common worship, common be- 
liefs and acts, are normal and most frequent phenomena of reli- 
gion. Even the enlightened individual to-day is deeply influenced 
in his religious attitude by tradition, early training, and environ- 
ment. 

On the other hand, just as morality has progressed from 
tribal custom to the ethics of free and rational personality, so 
religion has progressed; and the highest type of religion is that 
which has its roots in the attitudes and evaluations of free per- 
sonalities. This is all the more the case when the religious atti- 
tudes of free personalities involve a clear sense of the religious 
basis of social order, cooperation, fellowship, and loyalty to com- 
mon causes. An increasing recognition of personal freedom and 
responsibility in matters of religious faith and practice means 
spiritual progress, not the decay of religion. 

For the second and highest form of religious relation is the 
individual's insight, intuition, or act, in which he communes with 
the Divine and knows and obeys the Divine Will without any 
traditional or social intermediary. The individual feels himself 
in some sort of immediate relation to the Divine. I call this 
form "mysticism." It has many varieties, from the sensuous 
emotionalistic mysticism of the Sufi and of certain Christian 
mystics, to the intellectual vision of God of a Plotinus or a 
Spinoza, the austere moral visions of the Hebrew prophets, and 
the simple ethical or "spiritual" mysticism of Jesus, St. John and 
St. Paul. The highest type of religion is ethical mysticism. This 
is faith in, service of, and communion with the Highest or Perfect 
Being regarded as the living and transcendent ground of the 
supreme spiritual values — in short as the source and sustainer 
of moral personality and the ideal social order. 

Ethical mysticism has, of course, in the history of religion, 
been made the starting point for new religions of authority, based 
on the assumption of a static and finished revelation expressed 

1 Cf., in the religious development of Israel, the work of the Deutero- 
Isavah, Jeremiah, and Ezelciel. 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 541 

through supernatural events, written down in sacred books, and 
conserved by sacred organizations. Thus the fresh and first-hand 
vision of new spiritual ideals has been dimmed and even lost. For 
all modes of religious experience and expression intermingle in 
religious history. Organized Christianity contains elements of 
dualistic supernaturalism, of magic and mythmaking, of authority 
worship, of emotional and speculative mysticism, of prophetic and 
ethical freedom. 

Once it is admitted that the authority of the group and its 
traditions are not normative for the determination of the doctrine 
of reality and of human values, there are only two ways open to 
such doctrine — one is the way of unregulated individual senti- 
ment and the other is the way of reason. The way of individual 
sentiment may satisfy its possessor but it does not, by itself, lead 
to any socially valid principles. 

The way of reason is metaphysics or rational theology. From 
the standpoint of reason the authority of an organized social group 
and its traditions cannot be accepted without inquiry, for, in the 
first place, there are so many of them and they are discordant; 
in the second place, historical inquiry shows that they are the 
resultants of a complex of cultural traditions — political, economic, 
intellectual, physical, and so forth. The authority of sacred 
oracles is subjected similarly to the dissolving power of critical 
historical inquiry. Miracles do not authenticate revelation; for, 
first, they are claimed as the authenticating grounds of conflict- 
ing religious systems; second, if by miracles be meant especially 
divine interpositions which interrupt the order of nature, they are 
not in harmony with the tested methods and principles of science ; 
and third, if by miracle be meant the manifestation of a higher 
law which we do not understand, the argument is an appeal to 
ignorance. 

No supposed occurrence in the past history of the race can 
be accepted, without critical inquiry, as rational authentication 
of dogmas concerning the nature of reality. For any assumed 
extraordinary occurrence or extraordinary personality could be 
accepted as the source of a revelation of the nature of reality, only 
if it could be brought into harmony with the interpretation of 
present and living experience in the light of reason. To admit 
this principle is to admit the superior authority of the rational 
interpretation of actual experience and of man's present valua- 



542 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

tions. As Lessing and Fichte put it, not the historical, only the 
metaphysical can save us. This is not to deny that the words 
and deeds of great historical personalities may illumine the pres- 
ent problems of life and reality. If Plato or Aristotle can still 
instruct us in regard to thought, values and reality, so can Jesus or 
St. John. But if we cannot accept the doctrines of Plato, in so 
far as they are inconsistent with the rational interpretation of our 
actual data concerning nature and man, no more can we accept 
doctrines or supposed deeds of Jesus that are not in harmony with 
such interpretations. The only witness that has any final authority 
is the witness of the rational spirit in its work of interpreting and 
organizing the facts of living experience. In short, metaphysics, 
as the persistent effort of the human reason to attain a compre- 
hensive and coherent insight into the nature of reality as a whole 
and the place of human values therein, is the only rational foun- 
dation for a religious doctrine of the world. If one abandon 
subjection to group suggestion and imitation, submission to the 
authority of historical organizations and their traditions, and 
decline to become the prey of unregulated emotionalism, the only 
way for the attainment of a religious world view that is left 
for him is the way of metaphysics. 

Special sciences cannot give us a world view for two reasons : 
(1) No special science, for example physics, biology, or psychol- 
ogy, has for its province the coordination into a harmonious syn- 
thesis of the fundamental outlines of a rational conception of the 
world. This is the province of metaphysics. (2) With respect 
to human values, with regard to the nature of truth, of goodness, 
of beauty and love and their interrelations, the special sciences 
are neutral; they do not deal with the problem of values. It is 
the province of metaphysics to formulate a doctrine of values 
and of the place of values in reality. 

Eeligion is essentially a doctrine of values and the place of 
values in reality. Eeligion is not concerned directly with the 
physical order, but only indirectly with the relation of the physical 
order to the order of personal and social values. It will greatly 
conduce to the vitality of religion when its representative teachers 
abandon, once and for all, the intellectual and spiritual confusion 
involved in the intermingling of the exposition and service of 
spiritual values with primitive and discredited cosmologies. If 
the religionist will leave the interpretation of the genesis of the 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 543 

physical order to the sciences, if he will abandon the mistaken 
effort to validate religious values in terms of an invalid theory 
or dogma concerning nature, and abandon the attempt to authen- 
ticate the values of the spirit in terms of physical miracles which 
cannot themselves be validated, a great gain will be won. Reli- 
gious thought and devotion can then be concentrated upon the 
clarification, intensification, and realization of spiritual values. 
Let the religionist recognize too that the problem of the relation 
of spiritual values to the nature of reality as a whole is one to be 
attacked by rational reflection; that is, by philosophy or meta- 
physics. Thus, by applying the traditional and organized force 
of religious institutions to the spread of rational reflection in 
regard to the fundamental problems of human life, he will do 
his part in saving humanity from the recrudescence of blind super- 
stition, on the one hand ; and from the social and moral confusion 
that results from the disintegration of traditional institutions and 
beliefs, on the other hand. "Ye shall know the truth and the truth 
shall make you free." The truth can be known only through the 
exercise of the rational spirit. In this way alone are we made 
truly free, even though what we know is the uncertainty of our 
knowledge. 

The interpretation of the meaning of religion and the de- 
termination of its function and validity in the lives of rational 
beings is thus a principal task of metaphysics. Thus far, meta- 
physics is the philosophy of religion. Indeed, the principal parts 
of metaphysics are the philosophy of knowledge, of nature, and 
of human personality ; and the philosophy of religion is the culmi- 
nating point in the metaphysics of personality. 

It is the province of the comparative philosophy of religions 
to determine the psychological features of the chief types of 
religious attitude and experience in individuals; to consider the 
functions of religious institutions (in which are included systems 
of religious dogmas or doctrines) in the social history of the 
race; to trace the evolution of religion from its beginnings in 
animatistic nature worship, through the most significant stages, 
from crude polydsemonism to the most elevated forms of ethical 
and spiritual religion in which the values of a free personal and 
communal life become the central norms for the interpretation 
of reality; to weigh the respective values, for man's cultural de- 
velopment, of the principal types of religious attitude and expres- 



544 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

sion. Finally, it is the province of the philosophy of religion, as 
metaphysics, to weigh the claims of religion to embody truth as 
to the relation of human values to the order of the universe, in 
the light of the general principles of the scientific theory of knowl- 
edge and cosmology. In particular, the following questions con- 
stitute the critical problems for an epistemology and metaphysics 
of religion: (1) Is there a specific kind of religious knowledge — 
personal intuition and revelation of the divine order as embodied 
in the religious genius? If personality be the best clue to the 
meaning of the world process; then, since religion involves the 
entire personality, it may be that the religious genius is a revealer 
of the meaning and vocation of personality in a fuller sense than 
the scientific, the practical, or the artistic genius. (Indeed, every 
significant religious attitude seems to be a poetry of values cloth- 
ing a metaphysical content.) (2) What is the nature, value and 
destiny of human personality? (These are most crucial questions 
for the metaphysics of religion.) (3) How are we to conceive 
the nature of God and His relation to man? Can we on ra- 
tional grounds, and in the light of the various main aspects of 
experience, establish a justification for a rational faith in a 
supreme spiritual reality who, as the creative and sustaining 
ground of all existence, is the absolute good or ground of spiritual 
values ? If we have the right to believe in such a being, what are, 
and what may become, the relations of the human spirit to Him ? 
What is the relation of the evil in the world to Him ? Finally, 
what is the relation of the whole process of natural and human 
history to His life and activity? Concerning these problems of 
the metaphysics of religion I have already given such answers as 
I could. If I were to write other volumes on this subject, they 
would consist only in amplifications and illustrations of the views 
hereinbefore advanced. 

The following remarks may serve to make the foregoing state- 
ments clearer. Keligion has a social-historical character, since 
religious conceptions of value are personal affirmations and experi- 
ences, and persons always live in social and historical connections 
as members of specific cultures. Because of these social and 
cultural influences religion is ever associated with the changing 
intellectual, economic, political, and artistic complexions of his- 
torical cultures. No religious genius has ever existed who has 
not spoken his spiritual message in terms of the mental-social life 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 545 

of his own day and generation. Religion is a projection on the 
roaring loom of time of a concentration or unified complex 
of psychical values. What these values are in content, and what 
their status is in relation to the other values of culture, is always 
determined by the reaction of the creative personalities, who 
found and modify religious traditions, to the cultural complexes 
of their own times and places in history. Prophets, founders, and 
reformers of religion appear at definite points in the stream of 
historical evolution. They occupy determinate situations in the 
cultural life of humanity and their individual creativeness is due 
to the interplay of a powerful personality, rich in moral sensi- 
tiveness and productive imagination, to the cultural and natural 
environment. A new religious system thus always arises in the 
fullness of time — in other words, when several clashing and rein- 
forcing cultural currents are moving in the social life, struggling 
and blending together. Hebrew prophetism arose in the moment 
of such a crisis in Hebrew social life. Ancient Christianity 
arose when richer and more varied cultural currents met and 
partially opposed one another, partially blended together in the 
much richer stream of Hellenistic-Roman culture, cross-fertilized 
with the last and profoundest expression of the spirit of Hebrew 
prophetism. Ancient Christianity was a creative spiritual syn- 
thesis. The elements which gave rise to it were the powerful 
and creative personalities of Jesus, St. John, St. Paul, and others, 
the neo-Platonic and Stoic religious philosophies, and the mystery 
religions. 

The supreme paradox of the religious attitude, of religious 
experience and faith, is that, while it is always historically or cul- 
turally conditioned, it is essentially faith in the meta-historical or 
eternal quality of the values which it sees and serves. There is 
no genuine religious attitude, whether of revealer, prophet, mystic, 
or humblest worshiper, that does not, to the experient, bear the 
quality of lifting his soul and its values and aspirations above 
the raging torrent of time. For religion is essentially concerned 
with God as the perfect embodiment of the supreme values of 
life; and with the relation of the soul of the individual, and of 
the group life in which he participates, to a Divine Reality in 
which there is neither variableness nor shadow of turning. But 
this supreme paradox is not peculiar to religion, in the more 
specialized sense of the term. It is the final paradox which per- 



546 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

vades man's whole spiritual life, which enters into every function 
of his soul. Now and here man seeks, finds and contemplates 
truth and goodness, but the true and the good must be eternally 
valid as the apprehension of reality. Now and here he creates 
and enjoys beauty, but beauty must be the revelation to his soul 
of the eternal harmony. Now and here he seeks fellowship, jus- 
tice, and integrity, but these moral qualities must have a perma- 
nent nature, otherwise they would sicken and die to-day. He loves 
his fellows, he loves beauty, harmony, and justice. At once he 
is gone or the objects of his love have vanished; but they were 
eternal values. All that man values, strives for, loves, and serves 
seems to disappear in the cruel maw of all-devouring time. In 
religion man denies that his cherished values vanish into the dark 
backward and abysm of time. In religion he affirms, in the fleeing 
moment, the eternity of values. Thus the paradox of religion is 
simply the consummate expression of the paradox of life. Re- 
ligion sees and feels under the form of eternity. If there be noth- 
ing eternal but the restless and relentless passage of all values 
out of nothingness through a feeble and vacillating existence into 
nothingness again, then all religion is a vain delusion. Then the 
first and last word of metaphysical systems must be that of a 
mere Nirvana — an eternity of nothingness. Then all is vanity 
— including the quest of the scientist for the truth, of the moral- 
ist for justice and integrity, of the devotee for love and beauty. 
And the proposition that all is vanity and nothingness is vain; 
the only remedy for the troubles of man, the ills of society, and 
the puzzles of thought, is to cease to think and to live, if live we 
must, by instinct alone. 

But while we cannot do that and while metaphysics may con- 
sist "in finding bad reasons for what we believe in instinct, to 
seek those reasons, is no less an instinct," 2 I hope that, without 
further explication, I have made it clear that those who contemn 
religion and metaphysics put themselves in the ridiculous position 
of beings who, while unwilling to give up thinking entirely, are 
unwilling to think things through to the end, because it is hard 
work. I do not mean that it is everybody's business to think 
through these weighty and difficult problems to the end for him- 
self, but I do say that he who refuses to give a hearing to those 

2 F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Preface. 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 547 

who do attempt to think them through, on the ground that the 
work is troublesome and yields no quick returns or even obvious 
profits in the end, stultifies himself as a thinking being. Every 
man to his taste, but let him who is satisfied to be an oyster be 
a consistent oyster and live the part, thereby ceasing to pretend 
to be a man! If the power of rational reflection be one of the 
differentiae of human beings, then he who refuses to carry on this 
power to the point where it deals with the highest concerns of 
reflective life refuses to be truly human. Most stultifying and 
self-contradictory are those who, while blatantly proclaiming the 
power of thought to probe, to understand, and to control physical 
data, biological data, and sociological data, sneer contemptuously 
at metaphysics and theology, because the latter do not enable men 
to make bigger machines, and more material goods, to build sky- 
scrapers, or to increase dividends. 

And those who would reconstruct society and who would heal 
the divisions in the body politic without a metaphysics or religion, 
simply by collecting economic and sociological data and directing 
a new social polity based on such data alone, are attempting to 
build on a quicksand. Let philosopher and religionist beware of 
hearkening to the clamor that they become practical sociologists, 
that they give up speculation and contemplation, and jump into 
the hurly-burly of political and economic reconstruction. How 
can we reconstruct society unless we have first determined the 
goods, the values or ends, which we ought to seek ? And how can 
we determine the meanings of good and value without a reasoned 
inquiry into the nature, value and destiny of human personality 
and its place in the universe ? I hold that even imperfect religion 
is a much surer guide to social reconstruction than a crassly posi- 
tivistic and utilitarian social polity, based on pseudo-scientific 
sociological generalizations. 

Inasmuch as religion is the affirmation that the higher values, 
that are imagined, worshiped, and served in human existence, 
and by which the spirit of man is thus possessed, have a secure 
and enduring standing in the nature of reality, metaphysics is, 
thus far, simply the method of rational interpretation and justi- 
fication of religion. The fact that the religious attitude is pri- 
marily, in its popular manifestations, one of feeling and volition, 
and only secondarily a reflecting attitude, whereas, the philo- 
sophical attitude is one of sustained rational inquiry; must not 



548 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

blind us to their community of aim: to lay hold on the world, 
and to serve the higher spiritual values, to discover, and to live 
in and for the transcendent values, by every function of our psy- 
chical being. Philosophy, like religion, involves faith in the en- 
during values of existence; but philosophy sets the value of ra- 
tional comprehension and harmonious organization of all values 
in the light of thought in the primary place; whereas religion, 
in its traditional and popular manifestations, sets the emotional 
and volitional values in the primary place. There is between them 
no inevitable incompatibility. The light of reason is not a killing 
frost that destroys the emotional and practical values; nor can 
the latter values be well served without rational reflection. In- 
deed, there is a deeper harmony between higher manifestations of 
religion and philosophy : for, as Plato long ago taught, the motive 
of both is love — love for the good, the true, and for spiritual 
beauty ; for that which abides when all else seems to suffer shock, 
for the whole and eternal. If the philosopher's love is directed 
chiefly towards ideals or universal values, he must not forget that 
these actually live and move and have their being only in persons. 
If the religionist live primarily for souls or persons, he must not 
forget that souls become persons and gain enduring value and 
reality only in so far as they become the embodiments and minis- 
trants of ideals or universal values. 

Theology, if it is to be distinguished from metaphysics, can 
only be the historical and systematic exposition of the doctrines 
which are normative in and for a specific historical religious insti- 
tution — a church. Theology is thus the offspring of a social and 
historical organization or institution. It has its genesis in the 
value-experiences, and faith-affirmations, in the cults and polities, 
that have arisen and developed in specific and historically con- 
tinuous social groups. Thus a universal theology would be iden- 
tical with a philosophy or metaphysics of religion. Thus, when 
theology ceases to be the purely historical and systematic exposi- 
tion of the dogmatic foundations of the value-experiences, and 
faith-affirmations, the cults and polities, of specific historical or- 
ganizations or churches, and seeks to establish as universally 
normative certain interpretations of religious life, it must become 
identical with philosophy or metaphysics of religion. 

In short, the final account of the claims of religion to involve 
a universally significant and valid truth must be taken by a meta- 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 549 

physics of human values ; in other words, hy a rational construc- 
tion which will interpret the controlling ideals of man's spiritual 
life — truth, beauty, love and all forms of human value — and 
organize these into a harmonious system; and which will weigh 
the final question as to our right to believe that these values are 
at home in the universe. 

Religion, as a vital force in society and history and in indi- 
vidual lives, is not a by-product of philosophy. It is a native and 
bulky factor in man's cultural life. It contributes very weighty 
data which metaphysics or philosophy must take into account in 
framing a world view. It is as expressions of the creative spirit- 
ual development of individuals, peoples, and cultures, that reli- 
gions and theologies are taken account of by philosophy ; in other 
words, as living documents for the understanding of human ex- 
perience, human feeling, volition, and thought, as reactions to the 
spectacle and impact of the sum of things. The great historical 
theologies, for example, of Saint Paul, Saint John, Origen, Saint 
Augustine, Calvin, Schleiermacher, sprang from the interaction 
of sensitive and creative personalities with the spiritual currents 
of their times. No historical theology can be fully valid for an- 
other and a different time. But a theology from the past, like 
a philosophy or a social polity, may have considerable value for 
the present. Men change, but mankind remains the same; in 
other words, while the intellectual and general spiritual climate 
undergo secular changes, there are permanent needs, interests, and 
values in human nature. Human nature is plastic, modifiable, 
but it does not seem to undergo great metamorphoses. 

II. Is There Immediacy in Religious Knowledge? 

All genuine first-hand religion, whether of the learned or un- 
learned, involves the belief in the experience of a personal rela- 
tion to the Highest. 3 This is true, I hold, even where the Highest 
is not conceived as a Person or Personality. Even in Buddhism, 
although in its origin it was a religion without God, redemption 
or salvation is an immediate or mystical union of the individual 
with the absolute — the state of Nirvana. It is, of course, true 
that the transcendency, the awful mystery and majesty of God 

% Cf. the fine discussion of this matter in C. C. J. Webb's Divine Person- 
ality and Human Life, especially Lecture vii. 



550 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

may be so emphasized, as in some phases of Judaism and Moham- 
medanism and, frequently even in Christianity, as to render the 
object of worship inaccessible, except by intermediary, to the 
devotee. Nevertheless the very heart of religion is union or com- 
munion in feeling or immediate experience, and, by consequence 
thereof, in will, of the devotee with the Highest. If religious 
experience be valid, then the worshiper's claim to know God 
immediately, by intuition or insight, must be allowed reasonable. 

Such a claim cannot be disallowed by pointing to persons who 
have no such experiences or convictions; any more than we can 
refute the validity of aesthetic experience by pointing out that 
for many people there is no beauty or joy in poetry, music or 
painting or even in a sunset or a snow-capped mountain range. 
Indeed, one might just as well argue that the color spectrum is 
unreal because one is blind. It takes two to make a quarrel or 
a love affair ; and it takes two to make a veridical experience, the 
experient and the object. 

Indeed, all our scientific, as well as our aesthetic, interpreta- 
tions are based on immediate experiences. There can be no genu- 
ine knowledge of reality except in so far as there are veridical data 
of experience. Those who would rule out of court the possibility 
of an immediate experience of God, on the ground that all knowl- 
edge involves mediation or experience, forget that mediate or 
inferential knowledge rests, both in its beginnings and its succes- 
sive steps, on immediate experiences and insights. There must 
be data of sense before there can begin to be a knowledge of the 
physical world. Even in the case of deductive chains of reasoning 
each link is based on intuitive self-evidence. There is no opposi- 
tion between immediacy and mediation; rather an interdepend- 
ence and constant interplay back and forth. We reflect upon, 
analyze and synthesize, our immediate experiences and insights; 
and thus, through mediate reasoning, gain more comprehensive 
intuitions. I would say that immediate knowledge (in perception 
and intuition of self and other selves) is always the basis of knowl- 
edge ; mediate reasoning, both inductive and deductive, is the way 
to reflective insight or interpretation of the primary immediacies 
in knowing ; synthetic intuition is the goal. Reflective insight is 
no less rational because it is direct insight ; it is no less intuitional 
because it is reflective. 

But it is objected that one can know other persons only by 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 551 

analogical inference, and if one cannot know a human person 
immediately one certainly cannot claim to have an immediate 
experience of the Divine. I have already in Book I and Book IV 
discussed this matter fully. I have argued that we must assume 
the existence of other selves in order to get under way with knowl- 
edge and action. There is no escape from solipsism, if one begins 
with it. Moreover, one cannot really begin with it. In fact we have 
an immediate acquaintance with other selves, just as we have an 
immediate experience of physical things. Empathy (Einfuhlung) 
is the technical name given to this direct experience of other selves. 
My intuition of another self's life is just as direct as, often more 
so than, that of my own inner life. Indeed, if one loves another 
person, one's "sense" of that person's attitudes and feelings may 
have an almost uncanny swiftness and sureness. It is true that 
one may be mistaken in regard to the minds of others. It is true 
that one's immediate experiences of the presence of another con- 
scious life require to be reflected upon and corrected by mediate 
reasoning. In principle there is no difference here between the 
knowledge of persons and the knowledge of physical things. Im- 
mediacy in both cases is the starting-point and goal; mediation 
by discursive inference is the way, and this way is a succession of 
immediate or self-evident insights which play back and forth ; the 
process of inference is not linear. Objection to the possibility of 
immediate communion with the Highest as the heart of religion 
may be drawn from the countless aberrations, crudities and illu- 
sions with which the history of religion is filled. But, in prin- 
ciple, the same objection might be raised in any field. The more 
complex and significant the data and problems, the more varying 
and imperfect must be the actual knowledge as compared with its 
object. Such a trivial and abstract proposition as 2+1=1+2 
does not leave us much room for error. But when we come to 
the canons of art and letters, to social polity and personal relations, 
we have rich fields for partial and erroneous interpretations. Our 
individual experiences are partial and our points of view often 
very partial. To admit that, in the richest and deepest personal 
experiences, man knows the Highest imperfectly and fragmen- 
tarily, to recognize freely that one's personal experiences of the 
Divine are limited and colored by one's own individuality and 
culture, is not to confess them illusory. There is a deep but daz- 
zling brightness in the Highest, in the Perfect. We may see 



552 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

through a glass darkly ; but even so, we may see. Moreover, since 
it is in personal life, in personal spirit, that the most adequate 
embodiment of God can be found, if anywhere; and since no 
human life can embody the whole of the Godhead, although a 
human life might embody adequately his character and will 
towards man (as Christians believe in regard to Jesus) the ex- 
perience of the Divine in human life may, while adequate in 
principle, be imperfect and growing. 

On the other hand, direct experience of the Divine can only 
be a value-experience, an experience which is judged to carry a 
positive worth for the spirit. Its divinity must reside in its value, 
or significance. The claim to a direct experience of any value- 
reality transcending the limits of human nature, cannot be allowed 
to be conclusive in the court of philosophy. Jt can be admitted 
that a divine significance or worth inheres in the contemplation 
of the starry heavens, in the enjoyment of beauty and sublimity 
in nature, in the tragedy and comedy of the human lot and, above 
all, in the vision and appreciation of human character, of love, 
friendship and utter devotion. But this is an immanent divinity 
of value. At best it bears witness to the degrees of worth in 
which an immanent spiritual life is operative within the limits 
of human experience. Thus, for example, to speak in terms of 
the only religion of which I have any first-hand knowledge, to say 
that God is experienced through Christ could mean only that the 
highest and richest values of the spiritual life are experienced 
in the Christocentric life, and are mediated through Christ. 

To affirm that these values have a transcendent cosmic ground 
is to pass beyond the limits of human experience by an act of 
faith which has its source in the feeling of supreme value which 
attaches itself to the Christian experience. One may believe that 
these spiritual values have their source and ground in the tran- 
scendent and self -existent principle of things (God the Father) ; 
but such a belief transcends the limits of human experience. It 
is not knowledge in a philosophical or scientific sense. 

Furthermore it is, intellectually, a confusion to argue from the 
experiential immanence of those higher values in human social 
life, which are called Divine because they are the highest values, 
that any historical person can be regarded as the sole source of 
these values and the sole original and continuing medium of their 
revelation. It may be true, for example, that a historical person, 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 553 

Jesus of Nazareth, expressed and embodied a new and deeper con- 
centration of spiritual values, but it does not follow that the his- 
torical Jesus is now the immanent source of higher values. The 
Christ of present value-experience cannot be simply the restored 
figure of the man Jesus. Only the immanent spirit of God in 
humanity which carries forward the realization and experience 
of spiritual values can be the living ground of the present experi- 
ence of the Highest. It is perhaps a beneficent illusion that 
leads religionists to believe that, in realizing a new and deeper 
concentration of the spiritual life, they are going back to the 
historical Jesus. But it is none the less an illusion. 

I do not mean that the attempt to determine more precisely 
the historic character and relationships of Jesus is not eminently 
worth while; but I note that judgments thereon, the interpreta- 
tions of the documents and the person, are conditioned by the 
categories of the interpreters' world view or metaphysics. The 
liistorical does not save men ; only the immanent and living spirit 
saves them. This conception is in harmony with the deepest wis- 
dom of the New Testament. "It is expedient for you that I go 
away ; for if I go not away the Comforter will not come." "But 
when he the Comforter is come he will lead you into all the truth." 
"The truth shall make you free." "The words I speak unto you 
are spirit and truth." "I determined not to know Christ after 
the flesh." 

On the other hand, in religion and morals, as indeed in all 
that appertains to the culture of the human spirit, it is not in the 
passing moment of civilization, not in the ever-fleeing present, 
that the spirit can find the sufficing materials and patterns for 
its nurture. It is in the historical or time-spanning realities of 
cultural systems, of objective and enduring spiritual structures, 
that the "spirit," as something much more concrete and rich than 
a mere biological self, lives; and it is on these realities that the 
spirit is nourished. The spirit comes to its own only by living 
within what Hegel called "Objective Mind"; in other words, by 
participation in the continuing though changing life of historical 
cultures — in the intellectual structures embodied in science and 
philosophy ; in the ethical structures embodied in moral, political 
and other social institutions (of which educational institutions 
are of chief importance) ; in the aesthetic structures embodied 
in letters and the fine arts; finally, in the religious structures 



554 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

embodied in the whole tradition and spirit of organized religion. 
(It is, I trust, needless to say that these culture systems are not 
bits of a mosaic which as a whole constitutes the culture of an 
epoch; they interfuse; the culture of an epoch has a living unity 
with diverse facets.) 

I have already discussed this aspect of spiritual life more 
fully, especially in Chapter XXVIII. It may suffice to say here 
that, when I say that historical tradition alone is an insufficient 
ground for living religion, I mean that the historical tradition 
must be assimilated, relived and tested by present conceptions and 
needs in order to have valid meaning and to prove effective now. 
Man, as a spirit, is a historical being ; he spans time ; but history 
must make good with the living by lifting his spirit above the din 
and confusion of the exiguous present, by freeing him from the 
"all-too-human' ? of the passing moment ; it must serve as the lib- 
erator of the spirit, not its shaekler. The conservative who would 
bind the living wholly to tradition chokes the spirit and blocks 
progress ; the radical who would throw tradition to the dogs tries 
to fly in a vacuum. The liberal is he who uses the traditions of 
the elders for the enrichment and expansion of the living present. 

So it is in religion. To be more specific: The members of 
a Christian culture cannot live fruitfully and fully, if unregardful 
of their great traditions ; nor can they live at all if the traditions 
become iron bonds ; the life and thought of the founders of Chris- 
tianity continue to be fountain-heads of faith and conduct, in so 
far as they can be brought into a harmonious synthesis with the 
ethical and intellectual and aesthetic interests and concepts of the 
living present. If the past cannot serve the needs of the present 
it is dead and gone. For example, the validity of the Christian 
view of life and the world can no longer be established in terms 
either of Greek metaphysics or Mediaeval cosmology or Eoman 
law and feudal polity. The Christian view must come to terms 
with the science, metaphysics, social psychology and ethics of 
the present time; otherwise it will simply cease to interest in- 
telligent persons. 

In brief, the claim is admissible that men can have a direct 
experience of the Divine in the sense of the Highest values, if 
we recognize the immanence of the Supreme Spirit in the world 
and, specifically, in human life. In this sense we may say that, 
while the over-self must be superpersonal in that he must tran- 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 555 

scend the limitations of human personality and oversocial in that 
he must transcend the limitations of human society, social per- 
sonality must have its ground in him. It is much less untrue to 
say that he is a superpersonal community than to say that he is 
merely the impersonal spiritual bond of human society. He must 
transcend and include whatever is of worth in social personality. 
It is not within the province of a treatise on general meta- 
physics to consider in detail the problems of the philosophy of 
religion. What I have written above I have done with the intent 
to indicate : 1. The points of contact and relation between meta- 
physics and religion and the logical position of the interpretation 
of religion in terms of philosophy — what used to be called natural 
theology. For the latter study, in the proper sense, is no longer 
an attempt to prove the existence of God by arguments drawn from 
the evidences of design in nature; as philosophy or metaphysics 
of religion it is human theology — the enterprise of considering 
the place and value of religion as an experience and attitude of 
universal humanity. 2. I have insisted that the philosopher must 
treat the facts and implications of religious experience with the 
same respect that he accords to the facts and principles of the 
physical and vital orders, if he is to construct an adequate world 
view. Religious experience in the individual and religion as a 
form of social culture are both interwoven with arts and morals, 
economics and politics ; in short with the whole social order. The 
philosophy of religion is not merely a part of, it is, in a sense, the 
culmination of the philosophy of culture. 

III. The Meaning of Faith 

Faith, in its general sense, includes two psychical factors: 
(1) The sentiment or affective-volitional attitude of trust or con- 
fidence; (2) the ideational attitude which supplies the content, 
the image or concept, of the object of faith. One cannot believe 
without having some idea of that in which he believes. 

Faith is the attitude of personal trust or confidence. "Faith is 
akin to faithfulness and implies faithfulness in the object." 4 
One is willing to act or to repose if one has faith; one is ready 
to risk one's personal fortunes on the venture of faith. Loyalty, 
obedience, trustfulness are different nuances of the faith-attitude. 

4 H6ffding, Philosophy of 'Religion, p. 117. 



556 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

A faith is a strongly held belief — a belief on which one will stake 
something valuable. Faith is always directed towards the future. 
It is the strong presumption that conditions which now obtain 
(although one does not fully see them) will issue in results favor- 
able to values or interests in which one has a stake. Thus faith 
is dynamic, forward looking. In a wholly static universe there 
would be no occasion for faith. Faith is indeed the conscious 
form of the vital impetus (Uelan vital). 

Faith and hope are closely related. A strong hope or expecta- 
tion is a faith. A weak faith means a vacillating hope ; but the 
chief distinction between faith and hope is that faith is a voli- 
tional or active attitude of a person, whereas hope need not in- 
volve any active volitional attitude. I may hope that a certain 
thing will come to pass and yet doubt, whereas, if I have faith 
my doubts are at or near the vanishing point and I am ready to 
act. Of course, one may act without hope or as a "forlorn hope" ; 
and so without faith. 

Faith is a nearly constant condition of human action. Every 
day we go about our business with faith in the institutions of our 
country, in our friends and colleagues, in our families, in our 
own powers, and in the order of nature. Faith in the possibilities 
of human nature is the presumption upon which most workers 
for the good of humankind proceed. We live forwards and we 
must always proceed upon the assumption, at least, that things 
can be made better. The complete loss of faith would paralyze 
action. Even the most critical scientist, scholar or philosopher 
works upon the assumption that there is a true or intelligible 
order of things which can be discovered by patient effort; the 
artist has faith in the value of beauty ; the good man has faith in 
the supreme power of integrity and justice. Without faith human 
life suffers from creeping paralysis. Indeed, faith is essentially 
a moral act, an expression of the essential will; it is the deep 
of the believer's ethical character calling to the deep of a postu- 
lated kindred character, the affirmation of the spiritual quality 
of the self. 

Faith is always personal or quasi-personal in reference. Even 
faith in beauty, in abstract truth, or in the order of nature, 
implies that these things further human values. Faith in God 
is trust in the good will towards personal life of the highest 
reality. 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 557 

Faith is frequently set up as antithetical to knowledge or 
sight. And it is true that where we have certain knowledge, as 
that 2 + 2 = 4, we do not require faith. Faith, I have said, is 
directed towards the future and implies that its objective will be 
realized — that the present unknown conditions of its realization 
are nevertheless effectively real. But faith is not blind, except 
when the faithful is blinded by passion. A man may have faith 
in a worthless woman or friend, because blinded by affection. But 
a reasonable faith is based on a combination of probability and 
interest. I have faith in my friend, because he has proved him- 
self my friend; in the order of nature, because it has stood thus 
far; faith in my country, because of its achievements and prom- 
ises; faith in myself, because of my knowledge of my powers; 
faith in all these things, because I need them in the business of 
living. Thus, faith is an anticipation or forecast of fuller knowl- 
edge, based on the union in various degrees of partial knowledge 
and human need. Faith is compacted by productive imagination 
out of experienced fact and its interpretation quickened by 
interest. 

I will conclude with a brief indication of the interrelation- 
ships of personal valuation and religious faith. Faith in God is 
the global or integral presupposition or postulate of the attain- 
ability of true goods by the spirit. Faith is the expression of 
man's growing and dynamic spirit. If the world were utterly 
unintelligible or indifferent to man faith would be wholly an il- 
lusion and science and practical cultural progress delusions. 
Faith in God is simply the completion, the rounding out, of all 
lesser or partial faiths. I may remark that the scientific attitude 
implies a reverence for fact, for truth, that is in quality not dif- 
ferent from religious reverence. Faith in God may be based on 
several or all of the following grounds: 

1. The well-nigh universal tendency in mankind to believe 
in a supreme power or powers, "the determiner of destiny," as 
Mr. J. B. Pratt puts it. In view of the illusory beliefs that have 
been universally held this motive alone will not weigh heavily 
with intelligent persons. 

2. The continuous and widespread existence and influence of 
religious institutions as factors in culture. This proves no more 
than that organized religion and the beliefs on which it is based 
have been important factors in every civilization thus far. 



558 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

3. The fact that those who conspicuously have had faith in 
God seem to have received thereby unity, peace and strength of 
mind and to have been enabled to live vigorously and happily. 
This is the pragmatic argument from the fruits of belief. Against 
it may be set forth the evil fruits of superstition and fanaticism 
and the fact that some persons have lived vigorously and happily 
without belief in a God. 

4. The reasonable appeal of the teachings and personalities 
of prophets and revealers. This ground is relative to the individ- 
uality and culture of the recipient. Its real strength depends on 
its harmony with the next two grounds. 

5. The synoptic consideration of the order of nature and of 
human life, when this leads to the conclusion that it is reasonable 
to believe in a Supreme Cosmic Order that makes for goodness 
(in the inclusive sense of all values). 

6. Personal experience of the harmonizing and strength-giving 
power of faith — immediate experience of the Divine. This is 
sufficient for him who has it. I may add that only the fifth and 
sixth grounds seem to me really convincing to a thinking person. 
Of course, if, on these latter grounds, one is convinced of the 
reasonableness and value of faith in God, the other grounds rein- 
force his faith. And they play into one another. 

The problem of the place of values in reality is the taproot of 
religion. 5 "The feeling which is determined by the fate of values 
in the struggle for existence is the religious feeling. It is de- 
termined, then, by the relation of values to reality. This relation, 
as it manifests itself to men, determines the value which they 
assign to existence. Religious judgments, therefore, are second- 
ary judgments of value; in comparison with the primary judg- 
ments of value in which the first two groups of values find ex- 
pression they are derivative. 6 The two other groups are (1) the 
values connected with self-assertion; and (2) the values connected 
with the service of transindividual interests, such as the ethical, 
aesthetic and intellectual life. Hoffding calls the religious feeling 
cosmic vital feeling. I call it cosmopersonal feeling, since I hold 
that it always involves the place of personality in the cosmos. 

6 Cf. the very fine discussion of the psychology of religious experience and 
faith in Hoffding 's Philosophy of Beligion, especially Part iii, "Psychological 
Philosophy of Beligion.' ' 

•Hoffding, op. cit., p. 107. 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 559 

HofTding conceives the fundamental essence of religion to be faith 
in the conservation of values; but, since all values have actual 
being only in persons, the conservation of values means the con- 
servation of personal spirit. How can values be conserved or 
enhanced, if the actuality in which alone value lives be not con- 
served or enhanced? / would say, then, that the feeling which 
is determined by man's fundamental convictions as to the place 
of personality in the cosmos is the religious feeling, and religious 
faith is the act of trust of confidence that the universal order will 
conserve and further the life of personal spirits. Anything less 
than this is an emasculation of religion. 

There is involved in the question of the progress and continu- 
ance of rational spirit in individual form, in other words, of per- 
sonality in the universe, the fate of all the cherished creations, 
discoveries and evaluations of the human mind — of truth in sci- 
ence, of beauty in the enjoyment of nature and art and of beauty, 
harmony, integrity and justice in human life. 

No thinking person can be indifferent to the religious problem, 
since with it are tied up all other spiritual issues. Indeed, the 
seeming indifference or even active hostility of many persons to 
religion is due rather to the failure of conventional religion to 
find a home and sustenance for the higher spiritual values. A 
religious faith that does not find welcome for all beauty and that 
is not open to the spirit of free science is the foe of human prog- 
ress and sins against the spirit of religion. When the gods arrive 
the half-gods must go. Genuine religion involves faith in the 
existence and accessibility, through worship, of a value-reality that 
transcends the facts of external nature and of purely immanent 
human culture. The attitude of worship or devotion is the reli- 
gious attitude in its fullness. Its object is the transcendent inter- 
fusion of reality and value. Faith asserts the reality and su- 
premacy of the Highest — the perfectly Holy — as the fulfillment 
of what is aimed at in the highest spiritual value-attitudes of 
personality. 

What is the Holiest? That in which now and always the Spirits, 
Ever more deeply feel, are ever more fully at one. 

— Goethe. 

God, the object of faith and worship, transcends and includes, 
in his concrete livingness, the true, the beautiful and the good, 



560 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

which are partially glimpsed, served and enjoyed by personal 
spirits. Keligions faith is strong only where man has a strong 
sense of the value of the personal spirit as supreme over imper- 
sonal things and forces. No one can worship force or life without 
personalizing them. 

Faith is not a mere act of will. It is the supreme expression 
of man's entire personality. It is implied in all vigorous willing. 

There are, as Hoffding points out, with fine understanding, 
certain broad types of faith, as well as minor individual nuances. 
These broad types conform to the prevalent need of interest. 
They correspond to temperamental differences in persons and also 
to secular changes in the spiritual climates of human civilization. 
The chief of these types seem to be: 

1. Faith in an attainable perfect peace ; satisfying the need 
for deliverance from the "slings and arrows of outrageous for- 
tune," of escape from the turmoil, the wretchedness and empti- 
ness of the world — world-fleeing faith. "Come unto me all ye 
that are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest." Ex- 
tinction of desire, the abnegation of individuality in Christian, 
Vedantic and Buddhistic mysticism and monasticism are good 
examples of this type. 

2. Faith in the opportunity for self-development or self-real- 
ization, for the unfolding and exercise of one's powers. "I am 
come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly." This 
is the highest Greek ideal, as expressed partially in Plato and 
more fully in Aristotle. It is the prevailing ideal in modern 
ethics — in Shaftesbury, Joseph Butler, Goethe, Schleiermacher, 
T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley. Hoffding puts "confident boldness" 
as a distinct type and cites Luther's expression thereof — "God is 
that whereat a man may provide himself with all good and find 
a refuge in all need; to have a god therefore is nothing else but 
to believe in him and to trust him from the heart." This is 
scarcely a distinct type of faith, it is rather the expression of a 
vigorous faith. 

3. Faith as the satisfaction of the desire for aesthetic and 
contemplative union with the universe. This is peculiarly the 
type of faith which appeals to reflective and contemplative na- 
tures — to philosophers, especially speculative mystics, and to 
philosophical poets. It is found among speculative thinkers in 
all cultures— in the Upanishads, in Plato, Plotinus, in the 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 561 

Mediaeval mystics and scholastic philosophers, in J. Boehme, in 
Spinoza, Novalis, Fichte, Hegel, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Emer- 
son and Walt Whitman. 

Taken by itself each of these types is one-sided. In the uni- 
versal religion place must be found for them all; for all are 
phases in the life of personality ; the attainment of inner harmony 
and peace is a condition of self-realization, and union with the 
universal order is a part of it. But the most inclusive conception 
is the fulfillment of personality, for in this is included both action 
and contemplation, both peace and striving, both self-denial and 
self-assertion; for it is the realization of spiritual individuality 
in the service and enjoyment by the unique self of the lasting 
values of life. The universal religion is faith in the enduring 
reality of personal spirit; the doctrine of the value-content of 
personality belongs to ethics, the comprehensive theory of values. 
Religion is faith in the cosmical status of personality. The norms, 
of religion are ethical; in plain words, the value of a religious 
faith is tested by the adequacy of its ideal of personality. 

In conclusion, if we seem to have reduced religion to a merely 
human process, so that religion appears to be only the psychical 
reaction of leading individuals, and of social groups who follow 
their lead, to the tangled mass of human experiences, let it be 
remembered that the only sort of objectivity that will stand the 
test of philosophical criticism is the objectivity of a universal 
reason, universal moral nature and a universal spiritual insight 
and faith, working themselves out through the endless wealth of 
human individualities and cultural groups. The devotees of 
special sciences are apt to fall into the naively realistic attitude 
that they are dealing with things in themselves and eliminating 
human reactions. One principal use of philosophy is to remind 
the man in the street and the scientific dogmatist that every 
theory, every dogma, in science, social polity, and religion, is 
anthropomorphic. Human thought and conduct have concern 
only with a world of human experience. Philosophy delivers us 
from our individual caves, from the idols of the market-place and 
the forum, it delivers us from petty idiosyncrasies, from class and 
group provincialism, by delivering us into deeper understanding 
of and sympathy with the universally human. 



562 MAN AND THE COSMOS 



POSTSCRIPT 

The doctrine of personality developed in the foregoing work im- 
plies a social philosophy whose guiding principle is that personality 
is developed through the active and free participation of the self in 
the life of the objective spirit, which is embodied in social institutions 
or culture systems — economic, civic, educational, scientific, aesthetic 
and religious — directed towards the cultivation of personality. I 
hope to present some applications of this doctrine in a volume of 
essays on social philosophy. 

In the meantime I venture to say that the fundamental problem 
of West-European and American society to-day is the readjustment 
of mechanistic industrialism and democracy to the native and inex- 
pugnable craving of man for personality. In every department of 
our social life the pressure of mechanism on personality increases. 
Emerson would be appalled at the extent to which his words : "Things 
are in the saddle and ride mankind" have become a literal statement 
of the plight of our civilization. "Getting and spending we lay waste 
our powers." The marvelous progress, during the past hundred 
years, of mechanical science and industry, should have freed man's 
spiritual energies for a much more extensive and intensive cultiva- 
tion of fine living. One might have expected a widespread cultivation 
of liberal imagination and spiritual feeling; flowering in a finer 
and freer fellowship of noble minds quickened to a more lively ap- 
preciation and enjoyment of nature, art, letters, science and philos- 
ophy, in a life of urbane social intercourse. 

Instead of all this machines have enthralled the western mind. 
The two general obsessions seem to be the enjoyment of rapid motion 
nowhither, and the possession of more means of material comfort. 
Western man has developed machinery to do his bidding, but he 
tends to become the slave of his own machines and of his own body 
and its animal appetites, which are the only parts of him that mere 
machinery will serve. Everything fine in our industrial democracy 
is being endangered by mass impulses, mass appetites, mass imagery 
and quantity production to feed the mediocre mass soul. The stand- 
ards of education, thought, scholarship, taste, and character are low. 
In fact it can scarcely be said that any standards obtain general rec- 
ognition. There is little reverence for the past or for the finer things 
in life; there is widespread lack of moral courage, of mental sanity 
and rational self-control, of self-reliant spiritual character. We may 
be going fast towards a thoroughly mechanistic barbarism, varied by 
anarchical outbursts of primitive impulses. 

It is common to lay our present troubles to the Great War. The 



METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 563 

War cured no social ill, except, perhaps, overweening militarism and 
imperialism ! On the other hand, the War was the outbreak of a 
malignant growth that had been long developing within the body of 
western civilization. It exaggerated the ills of prewar civilization — 
material repletion with spiritual emptiness, neuroticism, perverted 
eroticism, practical materialism, social conflict breeding an irrational 
radicalism and an equally irrational reactionism, the vulgarization 
of life. 

The widespread irrationalism, the cult of crude impulse, the proc- 
lamation of a raw and sensuous egotism, the bitter illusionism and 
skepticism of our younger so-called "realists" in literature as to the 
possibility of any worthy and satisfactory values in life, the loss 
of any guiding ideals of conduct, and the decay of religion as a 
form of social control, coupled with the widespread hunger for a 
new religion — all these things are symptoms of the more or less 
blind reaction and craving of the human soul in the face of the ad- 
vancing tide of practical and theoretical materialism. There is that 
in man which must and does revolt against his being treated as a 
mobile self-feeding and self-propagating machine. 

I am in hearty sympathy with every desire and effort of men for 
finer, richer and more harmonious lives. I am in opposition to the 
superstitions of materialistic industrialism and crude egalitarian 
democracy. A finer civilization, a richer and happier life for man, 
will not be brought to pass merely by increase of material production, 
by industrialism alone; even though the distribution of the product 
be more nearly equalized through mass control; indeed, if these su- 
perstitions continue to grow our civilization will go to smash. The 
"stand-pat" capitalist and the materialistic socialist or radical are 
in the same boat, -spiritually. Their standards of life are the same. 
It is, between them, merely a question of whether the big animals 
who have been ruling the herd shall have most of the provender, or 
whether the little animals shall have what has hitherto been the lion's 
share. 

What the western world needs is that (without the recrudescence 
of hereditary class-culture), the principle of spiritual aristocracy, or 
the leadership of the finer values of reasonableness — self-discipline, 
cultivated imagination and devotion to the things of the spirit — shall 
be recognized as the standard and guide. Western society must, if 
it is to be saved, gladly follow the leadership of those who are dedi- 
cated to the service of the higher values. Only a fuller development 
and application of the ethical and other spiritual insights of the creative 
mind, to education and social administration, can bring healing 
to the nations. We need, in addition to the application of the prin- 



564 MAN AND THE COSMOS 

ciples of a liberal and humane ethics, a simpler and more universal 
religion of the spirit, a religion freed from the encumbering baggage 
of discredited cosmologies and dualistic ethics. 7 I have not referred 
to the thought of India or China in this connection, because it is 
not clear to me whether these forms of spiritual culture have any 
important positive contributions to make to our spiritual life. But 
India and China at least furnish great examples of how a rich life 
may be lived without the material comforts and industrial madness 
of the west. 

Probably the present disillusionment at the failures of industrialism 
and democracy is, in part, the effect of the collapse of the too high- 
pitched hopes of the nineteeth century. Perhaps the relative amount 
and power of creative and directive thought in Western civilization 
is as great as, or even greater than, in any previous time. To over- 
praise the past and to depreciate unduly the present is a fallacy to 
which the middle-aged and the old are always prone. 

Over against the diseases of Western industrialism can be set, as 
grounds for optimism, the increasing interest in education, notably 
in the liberal education of adults as well as of youth, the vigorous 
activity in all lines of intellectual enquiry and the spread of the 
scientific temper of mind; finally, the earnestness with which tradi- 
tional forms of moral and legal custom, as well as the forms and 
methods of traditional religion, are being challenged and subjected to 
a penetrating scrutiny. 

Western society stands on the threshold of a new epoch; it is the 
more necessary to insist that only through a substanial increase in 
the proportion of well-balanced individuals, combining stability of 
character with well-furnished, open and searching intellects, can the 
new epoch become a glorious one in the record of humanity. Social 
machinery, however cunningly elaborated, is not only worthless; it 
is a positive hindrance to the best life, unless it be subordinated to 
the development of spiritual individuals. The paramount duty of 
the present and the great hope for the future lies in the education 
of the individual. 

7 1 may refer to two articles of mine — "Democracy and Intellectual Dis- 
tinction' ' in School and Society, Vol. v (1917) pp. 421-430, and "The Functions 
of the Faculty in the Administration of a University" in the same journal, 
Vol. xii (1920), pp. 449-458, reprinted in the volume Educational Problems in 
College and University published by the University of Michigan; also "Phil- 
osophy and the Crisis in Civilization, ' ' in The Field of Philosophy, 3rd edition. 



INDEX 



Absolute, the, 139, 478, 479, 527. 

Absolutes, the pluralistic world of 
tiny, 158. 

Act, mental, 17ft\, 310. 

Activity, the knowledge of, 203-205. 

Adams, G. P., 383. 

Aesthetic feeling, 437, 438, 441, 442. 

Aesthetic values, 400, 401-402, 403, 
410, 430-433, 435-437; and cog- 
nition, 439, 440, 441, 444; and 
morality, 440, 441, 443, 444. 

Aesthetic view of nature, 486, 487. 

Aesthetics, 2, 9. 

Ahrimanes, 526. 

Ahura-mazda, 526. 

Alcheringa myth, 220. 

Alexander, S., 97; on categories, 134, 
140, 152, 182, 223, 228, 229, 230, 
235-237; theory of space and time, 
235-237, 258, 263, 469. 

Analysis, 6. 

Ancient Christianity, 545. 

Animatism or animism, 181. 

Anaxagoras, 184ff. 

Anschauung, die intellectuelle, 79. 

Antigone of Sophocles, 417, 439. 

Appearance and reality, 98-109; 
Bradley's doctrine of, 100-103. 

Aristotle, 1, 185, 265, 284, 407, 410, 
418, 540, 560. 

Aspects, percepts as, 245-247. 

Atomism and atomists, 185, 186; 
Humian, 76. 

Atomism, logical, 151. 

Attitude, mental, 18, 310. 

Augustine, St., 305, 539, 549. 



Automatisms, 336, 344, 345. 
Avenarius, R., 14, 85, 192, 323. 
Axiological order, 167; eternity or 

permanence, 516. 
Axiology, 1. 

Baillie, J. B., 329. 

Baldwin, J. M., 85. 

Beauchamp, the case of Miss, 348- 

351. 
Beauty, 208; truth and goodness, 

434-444, 445-447. 
Behavior as basis of knowing, 85ff. 
Behaviorism in psychology, 99, 295, 

296; moderate behaviorism and 

consciousness, 327-329. 
Being, 30, 155, 184ff.; existent, 155, 

subsistent, 155. 
Belief, 26ff. 
Benevolence, 415. 
Bergson, H., 7, 44, 45, 72, 78ff., 82, 

144, 147, 177, 186, 217, 242, 248, 

258, 265, 274, 276, 282, 372, 373, 

456, 461, 483. 
Berkeley, 68, 69, 70, 154, 188, 196, 

197, 227, 365. 
Binet, A., 348. 
Bode, B., 327, 328. 
Body as dynamic system, 369, 370. 
Boehme, J., 492, 561. 
Bosanquet, B., 13, 20, 26, 29, 52, 53, 

106, 154, 186, 207; quoted, 209, 

210, 211; 329, 353, 382, 407, 418, 

499. 
Boscovich, 242. 
Bradley, A. C, 438. 



565 



566 



INDEX 



Bradley, F. H., 3, 26, 29, 40, 52, 72, 
73, 77, 100-103, 106, 124, 140, 
154, 158, 182, 186, 196, 205, 207, 
217, 224, 312, 314, 327, 329, 353, 
407, 418, 433, 473, 560. 

Brentano, F., 13, 26, 298. 

Browning, R., 408, 492, 532 

Bruno, G., 248, 378. 

Buddha, 389. See also Gotama. 

Buddhism, 389, 509, 518. 

Buddhistic mysticism, 560. 

Butler, Jos., 560. 

Byron, quoted, 437. 

Caird, E., 154. 

Caird, J., 500. 

Calkins, M. W., 154, 248ff., 294, 295. 

Calvin, J., 549. 

Cantor, G., 145. 

Carlyle, T., 58. 

Carr, H. W., 216, 225. 

Cassirer, E., 187, 216. 

Categorialness, 62. 

Categories, the system of, 133-212. 

Categories, what are? 38fl\, 133-136; 
Alexander on,134; Hegel on, 134ff. ; 
Kant on, 134ff. 

Catholic Christianity, 519. 

Causal order, 33ff., 165. 

Causality, 37ff.; and novelty, 198- 
201; and purpose, 202, 203; and 
the problem of singularism and 
pluralism, 196-197; change and, 
191-205. 

Causation and power or agency, 193- 
197; totality, 201-205; conti- 
nuity, 199-201; mechanical and 
final, 191n\; uniformity, 197-199. 

Causes, plurality of, 197. 

Chandler, A. R., 19, 139. 

Change, and causality, 191-205. 

Chaos, 153, 282. 

Characteristic, the, in expression, 
438, 439. 



Christ, 552, 553. See also Jesus. 

Christian Church, 416. 

Christian culture, 554. 

Christian experience, 552; view of 
life, 554. 

Christian mysticism, 560. 

Christian scientists, 532. 

Christianity, 389, 526, 530, 554. 

Christocentric, 552. 

Clarke, Samuel, 216. 

Clifford, W. K, 261. 

Co-conscious, the, 336, 339. 

Coherence theory of truth, 52-55, 
64-67. 

Comforter, the, 553. 

Community, and personality, 207, 
209; God or Overself as ground of , 
495-500. 

Complexes and relations, 40. 

Comprehensiveness, as criterion of 
truth, 63. 

Concepts, and percepts, 44-48; as 
dynamic, 46ff. 

Confucius, 389. 

Consciousness, 315-333; and experi- 
ence, 315; and its objects, 317-329; 
and moderate behaviorism, 327- 
329; and negativity 329-333; 
as a neutral continuum, 319-320; 
and neutral Monism, 324-327; and 
" pure experience," 32 1 -324; de- 
scription of, 315; dialectic of, 329- 
333; idealistic theory of, 329-333; 
in general or pure, 14ff.; relational 
theory of, 317-319; 

Conservation of energy, 257, 269- 
271, 356, 357. 

Consistency, 62. See also Coherence. 

Continuity, 35, 36; and causation, 
199-201; and discreteness, 145, 
170ff. 

Continuum, consciousness as a, 319, 
320. 

Cope, E. D., 265. 



INDEX 



567 



Copernicus, 389. 

Cosmos, 153, 161, 477, 494. 

Courage, 415. 

Couturat, L., 142, 481. 

Creationism, as theory of the origin 

of the soul, 378, 379, 380. 
Creative advance, nature as, 223. 
Creativeness, 198-201, 202, 203. 
Creative process, 264-266. 
Creative synthesis, 265, 381, 455. 
Creighton, J. E., viii. 
Cultural order and personality, 383- 

393. 
Culture and philosophy, 7, 21, 297, 

312, 330-333, 382-393, 404, 405, 

415-423, 503-507, 538-540, 553, 

554; 562-564. 
Culture, present problems of western, 

562-564. 
Culture systems, 383-392. 

Dante, 175. 

Darwin, C, 389. 

Darwinian theory, 71, 273. 

Dedekind, R., 145, 483. 

Descartes, 8, 82, 112, 185, 197, 308, 
387. 

Determinism. See Freedom. 

Deutero-Isaiah, 532, 549. 

Development, and novelty, 170fi\, 
197-203. 

Devil. See Satan and Ahrimanes. 

Dewey, John, 59, 108, 293. 

Dialectic, method, 7ff., 77, lOOff.; 
as valid principle, 121, 125, 126; of 
conscious life as a whole, 329-333 ; 
See also Negation and Negativity. 

Differential psychology, 294. 

Dilthey, W., 294. 

Discreteness, and continuity, 35, 
36, 145; in development and evo- 
lution, 170ff. 

Dispositions, neuropsychical or psy- 
chophysical, 308, 337. 338. 340. 



Diversity, 33, 35. 

Divine, the, 540, 551, 552, 554. See 
also God, the Overself, the Cosmic 
Ground of Values, the Supreme 
Spirit, the Supreme Spiritual Com- 
munity, Super-person, the Univer- 
sal Order, the Trinity. 

Divine Comedy of Dante, 443. 

Double-aspect theory, 185. See also 
Psychophysical parallelism. 

Drake, D., 94. 

Dreams, and the libido, 338. 

Driesch, H., 43, 254, 255. 

Dualism, epistemological, 72. 

Dualism in mind-body relation, 355- 
359. 

Duality in knowledge, 55. 

Duration and time, 230, 231. 

Duties, 415. 

Ego, 15ff., 290, 323. See also Indi- 
vidual, Individuality, Mind, Per- 
son, Personality, Self, Spirit and 
Soul. 

Ehrenfels, C. von, 395. 

Einstein, A., 12, 216, 224, 225. ? 

Electrons, 93, 169ff., 257, 267, 368, 
369. 

Emerson, R. W., 561. 

Energeticists, theory of physical 
reality, 241, 242. 

Energy, 269ff . 

Energy centers, 267, 273. 

Enlightenment, the, 417. 

Entities, 156, 159, 163, 188ft 7 ., neu- 
tral, 324-327. 

Epicureans, 419. 

Epistemology, 1. 

Erlebniss, 14ff . 

Error, 110-115; and ignorance, 111, 
112; and personality, 114, 115; 
as denial of will to know the whole 
truth, 112-114. 

Essence and appearance, 184. 



568 



INDEX 



Essences, universal, as objects of 
knowledge, 94-97. 

Essential being, 185. 

Eternal " now," the, 515, 516. 

Eternity. See Time-transcendence. 

Ether, 169fL, 247, 369, 469, 474. 

Ethical values, 400, 414-426; and 
aesthetic values, 440, 441, 443, 
444; and personality, 414, 415, 
421-423, 424; and social life, 418- 
421; evolution of, 416-420; ulti- 
mate place in human life, 445-447. 

Ethics, 2, 9, 414-426. 

Eucken, R., 385, 408. 

Euripides, 417. 

European renaissance, 416, 417. 

Event particles, 140, 218, 221, 229, 
258, 470. 

Evil, and Christian religion, 531, 534; 
mystery of, 532-535; and im- 
mortality, 533; and the idea of a 
perfect being, 524-535; an inev- 
itable factor in the making of per- 
sonal spirits, 527-535; doctrine of 
finite God — no solution of problem 
of, 529, 530; dualistic theories of, 
525-527; function of natural, 520, 
521 ; hedonistic pessimism and the 
problem of, 518-520; moral, 522- 
524; natural, 517-521; not bare 
negation, 528, 529; problem of, 
517-535; social origin of moral, 
522-524. 

Evolution, and adaption, 275, 276; 
and personality, 273-285; ortho- 
genetic, 274, 275. 

Evolution, life, and mind, 261-285. 

Evolution, and novelty or discrete- 
ness, 170ff;.; and perfection, 501- 
516. 

Evolution, a process of soul-making, 
282-285; and perfection, 501-516; 
and teleology, 272-276, 283-285. 
See also Organic Evolution. 



Existence, 20; definition of, 30. 

Existence, finite, 154. 

Existence and value, 2n\, 12ff. 

Existents, 39, 40, 43, 153ff., 
159. 

Experience, 6ff.; and consciousness, 
315; and phenomenology, 15ff.; 
and reality, 8 Iff., 105ff.; as a con- 
tinuum, 84ff. 

Extensity and space, 227, 228. 

Extrinsic relations, 152. 

Ezekiel, 540. 

Faith and knowledge, 557; grounds 
of, 557, 558; kinds of, 560, 561; 
meaning of, 555-561; religious, 
557, 558, 559. 

Faust, 438, 439. 

Fechner, G. T., 248. 

Feeling, aesthetic, 431-433; and the 
self, 430; and the universe, 446, 
447; and values, 427-433; asindi- 
vidualing and valuing attitude; 
427-430. 

Fichte, J. G., 7, 72, 120, 154, 185, 
242, 248, 291, 353, 382, 393, 407, 
418, 492, 540, 561. 

Freedom and the cosmic order, 456, 
457. 

Freedom and determinism, 449, 450, 
451; and the future, 453, 456, 457; 
and the past, 453, 454; as self- 
determination, 448, 451-453; of 
choice, 448; of indifference, 450; 
moral, 448-457. 

Frege, G., 143. 

Freud, S., 337, 338, 339. 

Friendship, 415. 

Functional psychology, 293, 294. 

Galileo, 389. 

Gegenstandstheorie, 39-43; Gegenstand 

or " object," 39ff., 17,39,40. 
Geiger, M., 13, 216. 



INDEX 



569 



God, 185, 266, 299, 298, 399, 400, 401, 

402, 403, 464, 484, 496, 500, 525- 

535, 544, 552, 553, 558. 
Goethe, 175, 280, 305, 390, 410, 558 

(quoted), 560. 
Good, the highest, 423. 
Goodness, 208; beauty and truth, 

434-444, 445-447. See also Ethical 

Values and Values. 
Goods, ethical, 415£f., 451. 
Gotama, 493, 518. See also Buddha. 
Granular or corpuscular theory of 

matter, 169ft\ 
Greek ideal of life, 560. 
Greek, metaphysics, 554 ; tragedy, 439. 
Green, T. H., 154, 353, 418, 560. 
Grimm, H., 391. 
Groos, K, 431, 437. 
Ground, principle of, 37ff. 

Haeckel, E., 390. 
Haldane, J. S., 252. 
Hallucinations. See Illusions. 
Hamilton, Sir Wm., 28. 
Hamlet, 322, 363, 439. 
Happiness, 519. 
Hartmann, E. von, 443, 518. 
Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion 

and Ethics, 256, 500. 
Head, Dr. H., 461. 
Hebrew prophets, 387, 388, 416, 540, 

545; social life, 545. 
Hedonism, 519. 
Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 14, 82, 120; on 

categories, 134ft\, 140, 154, 182, 

185, 197, 207, 278, 330, 382, 407, 

418, 485, 492, 503, 528, 553, 561. 
Hellenistic-Roman culture, 545. 
Herbart, 325. 
Hicks, G. Dawes, 43, 324. 
Highest, the, 549, 550, 551, 552. See 

also Divine, God, etc. 
Historical continuity, 171-173, 176- 

178. 



Historical culture and the living 
present, 387, 388; and great per- 
sonalities, 388, 389, 390, 391; and 
the metahistoric realm, 392; and 
the ordinary individual, 391, 
392. 

History, 170rL; and individuality, 
176fi\; and novelty, 172ff. 

Hobson, J. A., 397. 

Hoffding, H., 555, 560. 

Holt, E. B., 324, 325, 326, 327. 

Holt, H., 343. 

Howison, G. H., 186, 197. 

Hume, David, 28, 69, 73ff., 76, 82, 
112, 186, 300, 302, 309, 310, 389, 
390. 

Husserl, Ed., phenomenology, 13-21, 
297. 

Huxley, T. H., 73, 390, 524, 525. 

Hyslop, J. H., 343. 

Idealism, objective, and theory of 
consciousness, 329-333. 

Idealism, subjective, or Berkeleyan, 
239. 

Idealists, absolute, 532. 

Idealists, objective, 29; theory of 
consciousness in, 329-333. 

Ideas as plans of action, 108. 

Identity, and diversity, 33, 35; 137- 
141; generic and existential, 
139ff. 

Identity-theory, 458. See also Mon- 
ism, Agnostic, and Neutral. 

Ignorance not same as error, 111, 112. 

Illusions and hallucinations, 106. 

Immanence and transcendence, of 
God or Overself , 495-500. 

Immanence of spirit in nature, 486, 
487. 

Immanent inspection, 15fT. 

Immediacy, and history, 553-555; 
in knowledge, 51, 52, 124; in re- 
ligious knowledge, 550-553. 



570 



INDEX 



Immortality, 458-464; a postulate 
based on values of personality, 459, 
463, 464; and psychical research, 
460-463; difficulty in admitting 
continuity of memory or^conscious- 
ness of identity, 460, 461, 463; 
parallelism and, 459; possible, 459. 

Individual, definition of, 206; 289, 
290; rational, as criterion of value, 
207. 

Individual, and universal, 48, 169- 
180; science and the, 177-179; the 
true, 174ff. 

Individualism, ethical, 417ff. 

Individuality as criterion of reality 
and value, 101-103, 106-108; and 
freedom, 454; and order, 145, 209; 
and reality, 212; and science, 173, 
251; and values, 434-447; con- 
cept of, in objective idealism, 290, 
329-333; value and purpose, 206- 
212. 

Individuation, 180, 278-283. See also 
Personality and Self. 

Individuum, individua, 151, 157, 
189ff., 194ff.; relations between the 
three kinds of, 243; three kinds of , 
242. 

Infinite, the meanings of the, 480- 
485. 

Inheritance of acquired characteris- 
tics, 273, 379. 

Instrumentalism. See Pragmatism. 

Intensive magnitude, 138. 

Interrelationships of values, 434-447. 

Introspection, difficulties of, 302- 
305. 

Intuition, 1 ; aesthetic experience as, 
433, 444. 

Intuitionism as theory of. truth, 51, 
52; intuitive acts, 80. See also 
Immediacy. 

Intuitive insight of the over-self, 
494, 495. 



James, Wm, 14, 44, 48, 56, 58, 62, 
69, 72, 84, 147, 151, 170, 182, 186, 
205, 248, 293, 301, 304, 305, 321, 
322,323,349,481,482. 

Janet, Pierre, 348. 

Jennings, H. S., 254, 262, 263. 

Jeremiah, 540. 

Jesus, 89, 387, 388, 389, 410, 419, 464, 
493, 539, 540, 542, 552, 553. See 
Christ. 

Joachim, H. H., on truth, 52, 53. 

Judaism, 526, 550. 

Judgment, 25fi\, 29ff., 49, 55. 

Jung, C, G., 338. 

Justice, 415. 

Kant, I., 76, 82, 84, 119ff.;~on cate- 
gories, 134fL; 176, 189; on space 
and time, 217, 224; 353, 387, 389, 
390, 393, 414, 418, 449, 450. 

Keats, J., 434 

Kelvin, Lord, 148. 

Kinds, 137ff. 

Kipling, R., 328. 

Knowledge and reality, 68-94; Ex- 
perience and reality, 81-94; final 
ground of, 116-129; presupposi- 
tions of validity of, 90; problem 
of, 9, 25ff.; theory of, Book I. 

Kuelpe, O., 13, 97, 297. 

Kulturgeschichte } 405. 

Laird, John, 97. 

Lamarck, 265. 

Lee, V., and Thomson, J. Anstruther, 

437. 
Leibniz, G. W., 154, 185, 196, 197, 

216, 242, 248, 265, 281, 285, 372, 

378, 473, 531. 
Leighton, J. A., 30, 60, 116, 295, 299, 

383, 395, 481, 501, 564. 
Lessing, G. E., 542. 
Libido, the, 338. 
Liebmann, O., 506. 
Life, evolution and mind, 261-285. 



INDEX 



571 



Life and matter, 276-285. 

Life and mechanism, 253-260. 

Life, properties of, 253, 254, 255, 256, 
258, 259, 278, 283, 284; super- 
mechanical, 258-260. 

Likeness and unlikeness, 33, 35, 137- 
141; degrees and kinds of, 137. 
See also Identity and Diversity. 

Lipps, Th., 13, 118, 297, 428. 

Locke, J., 82, 92, 185, 186, 188. 

Lodge, 0., 343, 369. 

Logic, 2, 296, 297. 

Lossky, N., 51. 

Lotze, R. H., 20, 179, 182, 185, 229, 
248, 381, 472, 473. 

Love, 415, 436, 445„446,447,530,534. 

Lovejoy, A. 0., 94. 

Luther, M., 389. 

it* 

Macbeth, 439. 

Mach, Ernst, 73, 192, 323. 

Machine, definition of, 256-258. 

Magnitude, intensive and extensive, 
33ff. 

Mair, Alex., 29. 

Mass particles, 257. 

Materialism, 185, 186. 

Material substance, 187, 188. 

Mathematics, 128, 142, 144, 145. 

Matter, energy and will, 377, 378. 

Matter, organization and individual- 
ity, 250, 251, 277ff. 

Matter and personality, 251. 

Maxwell, J. Clerk, 269. 

McDougall, W., 345, 350. 

McGilvary, E. B., 322. 

McKenzie, J. S., 329, 418, 481. 

McTaggart, J. M. E., 186, 196, 248, 
378, 484, 485. 

Meaning, 17ff., 26, 29. 

Meaning-content, 40. 

Measurement, 33ff. 

Mechanism and life, 253-260, 266- 
269, 272-276. 



Mechanistic doctrine of evolution 
stated, 260, 261; criticized, 267- 
271. 

Mechanistic theory of life, 255, 266- 
271. 

Mediaeval cosmology, 554. 

Mediaeval mystics, 561. 

Mediation, in knowledge, 51, 52, 88, 
550-552. See also Immediacy. 

Meinong, A. von, 14, 26, 27, 28, 39- 
43,189,395. 

Meister, Eckhart, 492. 

Mendelian theory, 280. 

Mentalism, 69. 

Mental, order, 166. 

Metaphysics and phenomenology, 
13-21; metaphysics and religion, 
536-561; differences in methods, 
537-541; methods and aims com- 
pared, 536-549; similarity in aims, 
536, 537. 

Metaphysics and theology, 541-544, 
547-549. 

Metaphysics and metasociology, 
292. 

Metempsychosis, 378, 379. 

Michelangelo, 389. 

Michelson-Morley experiment, 224. 

Mill, J. S., 73, 518, 525. 

Milton, John, 175. 

Mind and body, 355-381; dualistic 
theory of, 355-359; psychoneural 
parallelism, 359-362; psychophys- 
ical individualism, 366-377; psy- 
chophysical parallelism, 359-366; 
psychophysiological parallelism, 
362. 

Mind as directive, 357-359. 

Mind energy, 79. 

Mind, life, evolution and, 261-285; 
its place in evolution, 261-265, 278- 
283. 

Mind and physical substance, 367- ! 
369. 



572 



INDEX 



Minkowski, 216. 

Minot, C. S., 265. 

Mitchell, Weir, 348. 

Mohammed, 389, 539. 

Mohammedanism, 550. 

Monad. See Individuum. 

Monism, agnostic, 365, 366. 

Monism, epistemological, 68-70; 
mind-body theories of, or qualita- 
tive, 185, 190. See also Material- 
ism, Spiritualism and Identity- 
theory. 

Monism, neutral, 324-327. 

Montague, W. P., 324. 

Moore, G. E., 97. 

Moral evil. See Evil. 

Moral freedom. See Freedom. 

Moses, 539. 

Multiple personality, 348-354. 

Multiverse, 156. 

Munsterberg, H., 411. 

Mysticism, Buddhistic, Christian, 
492, 540, 560; ethical, 540; of 
Upanishads, 560; sufi, 540; ve- 
dantic, 560. 

Mysticism in philosophy and poetry, 
540, 560, 561. 

Mysticism, religious, 491, 492, 540, 
545, 546. 

Mystics, mediaeval, 561. 



Natorp, P., 142, 234ff. 

Natural, evil. See Evil. 

Natural selection, 273. 

Nature, 243, 244, 247, 472, 474, 486, 
487; and spirit, 486, 487; mechan- 
ical conception of, 257. 

Negation. See Negativity. 

Negativity, 124; and perfection, 
502, 503; consciousness and per- 
sonality, 329-333. 

Neo-Kantianism, 41. 

Neo-platonic philosophy, 545. 



Neo-realism, llff., 41, 97, 155ff., 187, 
189,324-327. See Neutral Monism. 

Neo-realists, 14, 28, 188. 

Neuropsychical disposition, 340. 

Neutral monism, theory of conscious- 
ness in, 324-327. See also Pure 
experience. 

New Testament writers, 533, 553. 

Newton, Sir I., 216. 

Nietzsche, Fr., 418. 

Nirvana, 82, 549. 

Noetic order, the ultimate, 475, 476. 

Non-being, 30. 

Nordmann, Chas., 226. 

Not-self, in knowledge, 116. 

Novalis, 561. 

Novelty and causation, 198-201; 
in history, 172ff . 

" Now," eternal, 515, 516; the, 505- 
516; the time-spanning, 514, 515. 

Number, 138, 142-147; and order, 
138, 139; 145, 146; and space, 
147ff.; and time, 146; as one-in- 
many, or discrete and continuous, 
143-145; definition of, 143. 

Numerical, order, 164, 165. 

Nunc starts, 516. 

" Object " as Gegenstand, 17ff. 

Objectives, 40. 

Objects of perception, 91-94; of 
thought, 14, 40ff. 

Oesterreich, K., 305. 

Ontology, 1. 

Optimism and pessimism, the prob- 
lem of evil, 517-535. 

Order, 38ff., 162-168; and number, 
138 139, 145, 146; concept as 
principal of, 45ff. ; numerical, 164, 
165; causal, 165, 166; teleological, 
166; organic and mental, 166; 
axiological, 167; social, 167, 168; 
qualitative, 163; spatial, 163; 
temporal, 163, 164. 



INDEX 



573 



Order, doctrine of(Ordnungskhre),AS. 

Order of the universe, 235. See also 
Universal Order. 

Organic evolution, factors of, 261- 
266; and individuation, 261-263; 
and mind, 263-266; and novelty, 
265, 266; and sentiency, 265; 
mechanistic doctrine of, 260-271. 
See also Evolution. 

Origen, 549. 

Orphics, 378. 

Ostwald, W., 242. 

Ought, transcendental, 41. 

Overself and personality, 479, 480; 
and the individual, 493-495; 473- 
479; as conserver of values of self- 
hood, 493; as immanent and trans- 
cendent, 495-500; as ground of 
the perfect community, 493, 494; 
495-500; finite selves- and, 486- 
500. 

Pan-objectivism, 105. 

Panpsychism, 248-252; arguments 
against, 249-251, 362, 363; argu- 
ments for, 248, 249. 

Pantheism, 185, 481. 

Parmenides, 100, 473. 

Particular, individual and universal, 
169-180. 

Pater, W., 149. 

Paulsen, Fr., 248. 

Pearson, Karl, 73, 74, 192. 

Perception, 90ff . 

Percepts, and concepts, 44-48. 

Perfection, and evolution, 501-516; 
and progress, 503-510; and the 
reality of the temporal, 502, 503; 
the problem, 501, 502. 

Perfection and teleology, 208, 501- 
516. 

Perry, R. B., 94, 97, 189, 324, 325. 

Persian religion, 526. 

Person, definition of, 290. 



Person, and science, 179ff. 

Personal idealism, 186. 

Personalistic or pluralistic idealism 
or spiritualism, 186, 190. 

Personalities, alternating, 348, 349- 
352; successive, 348, 349. 

Personality and body, 367. 

Personality and the evolutionary 
process, 261, 273ff. 

Personality, and truth, 108, 109; 
as criterion of value, 207, 208, 209, 
211, 212; multiple, 348-354. See 
also Individuality, Self, Soul and 
Spirit. 

Personality, and civilization, 385ff.; 
and psychology, 292-297; and 
the cultural order, 382-393; as 
microcosm, 289; mechanism and 
western civilization, 562-564; prob- 
lem of, 289-298. 

Personality and values, 395-413. 

Perspectives, 233, 245, 469. 

Pfander, A., 13, 14, 297. 

Phenomenalism, 14, 72, 81; in Berg- 
son, 78-81; in Bradley, 77; in 
Hume, 73ff.; in Kant, 76, 77; in 
Karl Pearson, 74, 75. 

Physical and the psychical, rise of 
distinction between ; 89. 

Physical reality, 238-252; and per- 
ception, 245, 246; and sensory 
data, 239; and the aesthetic qual- 
ities, 243-244; and the distinc- 
tion between primary and second- 
ary qualities, 241 ; and the micro- 
scopic mechanisms of physics, 
240, 241 ; and the physicists world 
of atoms and electrons, 246, 247; 
and the sensory system, 244, 245; 
is a social reality, 239; consists of 
individua in relations, 240-243. 

Plato, 89, 106, 140, 155, 185, 378, 
382, 389, 410, 418, 435, 493, 525, 
539, 540, 560. 



574 



INDEX 



Plotinus, 72, 500, 560. 

Pluralism, 154ff., 170, 185, 190, 485, 

490. 
Pluralistic concepts of substance, 

184-186. 
Poincare, H., 142, 234, 481. 
Point-instants, 138, 140, 218, 258. 
Pope, A., 532. 
Possible, the realm of the, 11, 

43. 
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, fallacy of, 

165. 
Pragmatism or instrumentalism, 55- 

63. 
Pratt, J. B., 94, 557. 
Pre-conscious, the, 338. 
Pre-existence theory of the soul, 378, 

379, 380, 381. 
Present, past and future, 506-516. 
Primary qualities, 187, 188; and 

secondary qualities, 241, 268. 
Prince, M., 335, 340, 350, 351. 
Principle of sufficient reason, 191. 
Pringle-Pattison, A. Seth, 197. 
Problem of personality, 289-298. 
Progress and perfection, 504-510. 
Psychological analysis, limitations 

of, 302, 303. 
Psychophysical dispositions, 308, 337, 

338. 
Psychophysical individualism, 366- 

377. 
Psychophysical parallelism, 359-366; 

and materialism, 362, 363-365; 

and spiritualism or Berkeleyan 

idealism, 365. 
Psychologism, 14, 27, 297. 
Psychology, and philosophy, 298. 
Psychology, 2, 9; and culture, 291, 

292, 297, 298; and problem of per- 
sonality or selfhood, 292-298; 

logic and ethics, 296, 297; place 

of, in system of the sciences, 298 } 

various types of, 293-290, 



Pure experience, and consciousness, 

321-324. 
Purpose, and reality, 105. See also 

Individuality, Teleology and 

Value. 
Purposive Order, 33ff., 209fi\, 511ff. 
Pythagoras, 378. 

Quality, 137-138; and quantity, 
142-150; qualities, the thing and 
its, 181-184; qualitative order, 
163. See also Primary, Second- 
ary and Tertiary Qualities. 

Quantity, and quality, 142-150; as 
relation, 146-149, 150. 

Raphael, 389. 

Rashdall, H., 197. 

Realism, critical, 94-97. 

Realism, naive, 69, 71, 72; social, 
70, 84; " transfigured," 73. 

Reality, 20, 29, 30ff., 43; and knowl- 
edge, 68-97; and appearance, 98- 
109; and experience, 6ff., 81ff., 
105ff.; distinction between phys- 
ical and mental, 238, 239; logical 
and existential, 247; as prospec- 
tive, 272ff. See also Perfection 
and Evolution. 

Reinach, A., 13. 

Relations and Relationships, 31, 32, 
37ff., 39, 41, 43, 63, 77, 103ff., 
121f.m., 138ft\, 146ff.; 151-161; 
and universals, 151; as dynamic, 
152; the singularistic theory of, 
153, 154; the pluralistic theory of, 
154, 155; as transitive, 151; imme- 
diate and mediate, 156, 157; not 
external to their terms, 156-161, 
summary of theory of, 159-161. 

Relativity of space and time, 224- 
228. 

Relevant and irrelevant relations, 1* 
37, 152, 159, 






INDEX 



575 



Religion, and history, 541-543, 544, 
545; as group-reaction, 538-540; 
as mystical or metahistorical in- 
sight, 540, 545, 546; as total reac- 
tion of individual, 537, 538; de- 
velopment of, 540, 541; philoso- 
phy of, 2, 9, 543, 544. 

Religion, metaphysics and, 536-561. 

Religious faith, 555-561; grounds 
of, 557, 558; kinds of, 560, 561. 

Religious values, 401, 402, 403, 410, 
425, 426. 

Renouvier, C. B., 186. 

Retrospection, and introspection, 
304. 

Rickert, H., 178, 383, 408, 411. 

Rights, 415. 

Ritter, W. E., 278. 

Rogers, A. K, 94. 

Royce, Josiah, 29, 106, 108, 182, 
186, 195, 248, 329, 353, 382, 407, 
481, 483, 506, 516, 522, 523. 

Ruge, A., 37. 

Ruskin, J., 435. 

Russell, Bertrand, llff., 43, 59, 60, 
75, 142, 143, 144, 145, 189, 216, 
218, 239, 247, 324, 325, 481, 482. 

Russell and Whitehead, 481. 

Rutherford, E., 369. 

Saint John, 492, 540, 542, 545, 

549. 
Saint John of the Cross, 492. 
Saint Paul, 389, 410, 492, 540, 545, 

549. 
Salisbury, Lord, 169. 
Santayana, G., 94. 
Satan, 523, 526. 
Satisfaction, as criterion of truth, 

58-61. 
Scheler, M., 13, 14, 297, 383. 
ScheUing, F. W. J., 72. 
Schiller, Frederick, 281, 435, 438, 

443. 



Schiller, F. C. S., 26, 186. 

Schleiermacher, F. E. D., 549, 560. 

Schlick, M., 224. 

Schopenhauer, A., 248, 518, 519. 

Secondary qualities, 188; and primary 
qualities, 241. 

Self-realization of mind, in knowl- 
edge, moral endeavor, aesthetic 
vision, and religion, 125. 

Self, and atomistic psychology, 309, 
310; and the physical organism, 
311; as cause, 308, 309; as living 
in attitudes and appreciations, 
310; Mr. Bradley on the, 312-314. 
Self, as ultimate unity, 153. See 
also Individual, Individuality, 
Mind; Person, Personality, Soul 
and Spirit. 

Self, subliminal, 339-344, 345-347. 

Self, definition of, 291 ; the soul and 
spirit, in knowledge, 84£f., 99ff. 

Self, and psychophysical dispositions, 
307, 308; and time, 220-221, 230, 
231; as knower and as known, 
303, 305-308; continuity of, in 
memory, 306, 307; denial of 
reality of, 300-303; immediately 
known, 303-305; problem of, 299; 
the nature of, 299-314. 

Selfhood, three phases of, 352-354. 

Self-psychology, 294. 

Selves, community of, 69, 70, 99, 120, 
126, 382fl\, 415ff., 489-491; finite 
as real, 489-491. 

Selves, finite and the Overself, 486- 
500. 

Sense data, 136/ 239ff. 

Sense qualities, 239ff. 

Sensory appearances, the primary 
physical realities, 240, 244, 245. 

Sentiments and values, 428-430. 

Series, concept as law of, 45ff. 

Sexual selection, 273. 

Shaftesbury, 560. 



576 



INDEX 



Shakespeare, 175, 374, 363, 389, 434, 
493. 

Shelley, P. B., 434, 492. 

Sherrington, C. S., 282, 361. 

Shotwell, James T., 220. 

Sidis and Goodheart, 349. 

Simpson, J. G., 254. 

Singularism, 153ff., 170, 185, 190, 
472, 473, 478, 479, 485, 488, 490. 

Singularistic concepts of substance, 
184-186. 

Skepticism, 122, 123. 

Social mind, as test of truth, 117, 118. 

Social order, and objective order, 70, 
167, 168. 

Social philosophy, 2. 

Social psychology, 383, 384. 

Society, and reality, 86ff. ; and space 
and time, 220, 221, 222; of free 
persons the goalof evolution, 262ft\, 
490. See also Community. 

Socrates, 389, 390, 493, 539. 

Soddy, F., 369. 

Sophistical age in Greece, 417. 

Sophocles, 417. 

Sorley, W. R., 197, 408, 411. 

Soul, origin of idea of, 89, 90, 378, 
381; creationist theory of, 379- 
381; pre-existence theory of, 378, 
379; traducianist theory of, 379. 

Soul, or spirit, as principle of creative 
synthesis, 381. 

Soul-substance, 187. 

Space, a complex of relations, 228; 
and existence, 230, 233; and num- 
ber, 147ff.; and perception, 75; 
discontinuity of empirical, 219; 
the " body " of time, 229, 235. 

Space and time, 215-237; and math- 
ematical theory of continuity, 217, 
218; antinomies of, 217; as con- 
ceptual relations, 219-223; as 
concretions of the categories, 215, 
216 • as correlative aspects of na- 



ture, 223-227; as empirical attri- 
butes of sensory data, 218, 219; 
as perspectives of the one cosmic 
order, 235, 237; as physical or ob- 
jectively real, 223-235; as real 
relations, 226, 227; solution of 
antinomies of, 232, 233; the rela- 
tion of matter to, 229, 232; whether 
absolute or relative, 216. 

Space, time and deity, 236. 

Space, time and invariance, 234, 235. 

Space, time, and the cosmic order, 
229, 235. 

Space, time, life, and mind, 236. 

Spaulding, E. G., 43, 155, 186. 

Spencer, Herbert, 73, 261, 274. 

Spinoza, 37, 185, 196, 359, 473, 484, 
492, 502, 540, 561. 

Spirit as person, 290, 291. 

Spirit, as dynamic, organizing prin- 
ciple of body, 369, 370; or soul, 
as principle of creative synthesis, 
280, 381. 

Spiritism, 343, 460-463. 

Spiritual order, 167; 476-480; 486- 
500, 503, 513-516, 525-535. 

Spiritualism, spiritualist, 153ft\, 185. 
See also Idealism and Idealists; 

Stern, L. W., 186, 248. 

Stout, G. F., 26, 340. 

Sturt, H. C. 186. 

Strong, C. A., 94, 248, 361. 

Structural psychology, 292, 293. 

Subconscious, the, 334-337; and 
ideas, 339; as the unconscious, 
337; automatisms and suggesti- 
bility as, 336; dreams and the, 337, 
338; meaning of, 334; memories as, 
337; summary view of, 347; three 
types of, 334, 335. 

Subjectivism, 27ff. 

Subliminal Self, 339-344, 345-347. 

Subsistence, and subsistents, 39ff. 

Subsistents, 39, 42. 



INDEX 



577 



Sub specie, aeternitatis, 37. 

Substance, 36; criticism of category 
of, 186-188; definition of, 184; 
problem of, 180-190; singularistic 
and pluralistic concepts of, 184- 
186; value of, 189, 190. 

Substantial, the, 190. 

Sufi-mysticism, 540. 

Suggestibility, 333ff. 

Supposals (Annahmeri), 39ff. 

Supreme self or mind, 127-129; and 
evolution, 128, 129. 

Supreme spirit or spiritual com- 
munity, 477, 479, 493, 494, 496, 
497, 498, 501, 502, 503, 504, 505, 
516, 525, 531, 534, 554. 

Synthesis, 6. 

System or coherent wholeness in 
knowledge, 84ff., 120, 121, 127- 
129. 

Taylor, A. E., on appearance and 
reality, 101, 102, 154, 182, 532. 

Teleological activity, 413. 

Teleological order, 166. 

Teleology, 198, 202, 203, 208-212 
252, 255, 256, 272-276, 278-285, 
367. See also Individuality, Pur- 
pose and Value. 

Telepathy, 343, 344. 

Temperance, 415. 

Temporal order, 33ft\, 163, 164, 230, 
231, 232; and the trans-temporal, 
233-235, 505-516; purpose and 
values and the, 511-513. 

Tennyson, A., 380 (quoted), 492, 535 
(quoted), 561. 

Tertiary qualities, 409. 

Theism, 185, 479, 480. See also 
God, Universal Mind, Universal 
Order, Overself, Supreme Spirit, 
Trinity. 

Theology, 1, and metaphysics, 541- 
544, 547-549. 



Thing, as substance, 181, 184; and 
its qualities, problem of, 182-184. 

Things, 33ff. 

Things, 157, 240ff. 

Thinking, what is?, problems of, 
25f.; nature of, 31ff. 

Thomson, J. Arthur, 254, 255-256, 
262, 263. 

Thomson, J. J., 369. 

Thought and experience, 82ff. 

Time, the " soul " of space, 235, 239; 
and the Cosmic Self, 231 ; a social 
concept of, 220, 221; the form of 
succession or duration, 230. 

Time and space, 215-237. 

Timelessness, logical, 515. 

Time-transcendence, 511-516. 

Titchener, E. B., 13, 292, 360. 

Tolstoi, L., 435. 

Totality, 36. 

Totum simul, 516. 

Traducianism, 378, 379. 

Transcendence. See Immanence. 

Transcendental mind as ground of 
truth, 119-129; as conscious, 123. 

Trans-spatial, mind as, 230, 371. 

Trans-temporal, mind as, 371. See 
also Time-transcendence. 

Trinity, the doctrine of the, 473, 
495-500. 

Truth, beauty and goodness, 434, 
447. 

Truth, and error, 110-115; and 
reality, 116-129, 208; coherence 
theory of, 52-55; definition of, 63- 
67; intuitional theory of, 51, 52; 
pragmatic or instrumentalists the- 
ory of, 55-63; problem of, 27ff.; 
criteria of, 49-67; copy theory of, 
49-51. 

Truthfulness, 415. 

Unconscious, the, 337, 341, 342, 344, 
345; dispositions, 337, 338. 



578 



INDEX 



Underbill, Evefyn, 305. 

Uniformity, 36. 

Units, 34. 

Universal mind, the, 128, See also 
God, Overself, Universal Order. 

Universal order, the, 235, 467-485; 
and absolute idealism, 478; and 
goodness, 476-478; as cosmic 
ground of values, 476-480; as in- 
variant order, 469-475; as spatial 
and temporal, 467-475; interaction 
of physical elements in, 467-469, 
472-475; passage of nature and, 
468, 469-471; ultimate noetic 
order, 475, 476. 

Universals, 31ff, 35ff., 41; and rela- 
tions, 151, 155fi\; the particular 
and the individual, 169-180. 

Unlikeness, 33, 35. 

Upanishads, 378, 560. 

Urban, W. M., 395. 

Value, and purposiveness, 209fT. ; 
and values, 3ft\, 9, 10ff., 41, 42, 
364, 365. 

Values, and feeling, 395; and per- 
sonality, 395-413; and the self, 
395, 396; immediate and mediate, 
396-398. 

Values, absolute or over-individual, 
405-^07; aesthetic, 400, 401, 402, 
403, 410; and history, 405; and 
persons, 404, 405, 411, 413, 414, 
415, 421, 423, 424, 425, 426; and 
the cosmic order, 412, 413, 476- 
480, 511-513; classification of, 
398; economic, 397, 398; emo- 



tional, 400-402; ethical, 400, 414- 
426; feeling of and judgment of, 
396; metaphysics of, 411-413; ob- 
jectivity of, 408-410; practical, 
399, 400; relations between main 
types of, 402, 403, 434-447; rela- 
tivity of, 410, 411; religious, 401, 
402, 403, 410, 425, 426; truth, 
398, 399. 

Vedanta philosophy, 100, 560. 

Virtues, 415. 

Wagner, Richard, 438. 

Walter, H., 280. 

Ward, James, 85, 185, 197, 205, 248, 

265, 271, 294, 320, 340, 473, 

516. 
Warren, H. C, 296. 
Watson, J. B., 295. 
Webb, C. C. J., 291, 500, 549. 
Wells, H. G., 525. 
Whitehead, A. N., 142, 219, 223, 232, 

258, 468, 470, 471. 
Whitman, Walt, 561. 
Whole and part relation, 139. 
" Will to believe," 28. 
Windelband, W., 41, 408, 411. 
Woodbridge, F. J. E., 318. 
Woodworth, R. S., 296. 
Wordsworth, Wm, 378, 492. 
Wundt, W., 265, 283. 

Young, J. W , 143. 

Zeno, the eleatic, 217, 224. 
Znaniecki, FL, 383. 
Zooism, 181, 



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